Julian Dorey Podcast - #257 - Ancient Language Expert on BANNED Bible, Book of Enoch & Jesus Origins | Wes Huff

Starting point is 00:00:00 Council of Nicaea doesn't even talk about the books of scripture. So nothing at the Council of Nicaea has anything to do with the canon of scripture. That's already an established fact. When? Oh, within the second century. Within the second century, you- But for the Roman Empire though? Because they were still torturing Christians at that time.

Starting point is 00:00:13 But the Roman Empire is still pagan by the time you get the Edict of Milan and the decriminalization of Christianity. I know. That's what I'm saying. So how would they have, how would the Roman Empire have gotten along with the acceptance of what the gospels are? Oh, they don't. No, this is established by Christianity.

Starting point is 00:00:29 Yes. I know that. So Christians already have the 27 books that we call the New Testament. And who would you say established that? Like it may not be one person, but like what people said, yo, this is what we're going with. So there are lots of canon lists within the early church so hey guys if you're not following me on spotify please take a second to hit that button and leave a five star review it is a huge huge help to the show and you can also follow me on instagram and

Starting point is 00:00:58 on x by using the links in my description thank you westhoff all the way from toronto all the way from toronto how was that flight in it was good yeah uneventful that's what you want in a flight Thank you. Wes Huff, all the way from Toronto. All the way from Toronto. How was that flight in? It was good. Yeah, uneventful. That's what you want in a flight, don't you? It's also like Toronto's so close. I never think about that until I buy someone a ticket from Toronto.

Starting point is 00:01:16 It's like an hour and a half. It's not too bad. Yeah, it didn't take long at all. And you had never been to New York before? No, not officially. I've been to the state, but not like New York, New York. Yeah, I've driven through the state, but not like New York, New York. Yeah, I've driven through actually a couple summers back. I have a mentor of mine who was a retired philosophy professor who donated his library to me and he lives in Texas. So just east, no,

Starting point is 00:01:39 west of Waco. And so I flew down and I filled a U-haul trailer or truck full of 2 000 books and i drove them back up to toronto from texas so i i've driven through the state right yeah right but first time experiencing the building oh yeah for sure yeah yeah i was telling you as far as like hoboken new jersey city goes the actual view of seeing manhattan for the first time doesn't get better than that it's pretty sick yeah there are very few like very quintessential skylines. The Toronto skyline has the CN Tower, but there's just something about a city like New York that's a little bit more identifiable. Belly of the beast, man. Yeah. But anyway, your Instagram has really been popping off over the summer and everything. And my producer, Alessia Alamon,

Starting point is 00:02:24 who is out of town today. So your boy is going to be the producer on this one. We'll be doing this live. I'll clean it up after too, to make sure all the camera angles are right. But he was the one who had found you and showed me some of your videos where you're responding to like a lot of different guys on the internet who are making claims about ancient history, things like that. Sometimes things that you may view as evidence to the contrary, for sure. But you do like a really nice educational background on it. And obviously, you're coming at it from the lens of being a religious person yourself. You're Baptist, part of the Protestant religion of Christianity. So you have an expertise and also

Starting point is 00:03:03 a belief system there. But, you know, did you grow up religious as well? Was this always something that was a part of your life? Yeah. So I was a pastor's kid and a missionary kid. So I grew up with my parents both coming from Christian heritage. But I really kind of made an aspect of that my own in my later teens, and then really digging into some of the things historically that I was just genuinely curious about. It wasn't that it wasn't present when I was growing up. It was just not in the same sort of conversational vein as how I'm interested in it now, in terms of the history of the Bible, some of the biblical language stuff, and ancient Near East, Greco-Roman antiquity, that kind of stuff.

Starting point is 00:03:49 But I grew up Christian. And you also, you had an experience as a kid where you were like paralyzed or something like that. Yeah. And you healed because you're not paralyzed now. I'm not paralyzed now. You look great. Yeah, thanks. But what happened there?

Starting point is 00:04:01 Yeah. So just before my 11th birthday, I was diagnosed with a rare neurological condition called acute transverse myelitis. So that's a word you can forget as soon as you hear it. But what happened was I was homesick on a Wednesday afternoon from school, and I'd gone down, I was camping out in the bathroom for reasons we don't necessarily need to go into, but I had gone down for a nap, and when I woke up, I couldn't feel my legs. And so I called my mom and she eventually called,

Starting point is 00:04:31 there's a program, I still think it exists in Ontario and Canada called telehealth where you can basically call a nurse. And they said, you need to call an ambulance. So my mom called an ambulance. I was rushed to the local hospital and then on to London, Ontario Children's Hospital. And so in the pediatric wing, and I was diagnosed with that condition.

Starting point is 00:04:49 And what they told me was that my body's immune system, instead of attacking the flu, it attacked the nerve endings at the base of my spinal cord. Yeah, and it caused inflammation to the myelin sheath on the spine and cut off connection between the communication of my legs and my brain. Now, how do you fix that? You don't. So you do and you don't. So what they basically

Starting point is 00:05:12 told me is transverse myelitis is a condition that's related to MS in the sense of it's degrading. And the quicker the paralysis happens, the less likely the chances of recovery are. And so what I was told was, since it was instant, as far as they know, right? I was, you know, I don't think I was asleep for more than, you know, 30, 40 minutes. Right, and you went to bed feeling perfect. Your legs are all good. I was totally fine.

Starting point is 00:05:41 Yeah, when I woke up, actually, the numbness was about at my mid thigh. And by the time I went from the ambulance to the hospital, it had actually creeped up to my waist. And it stayed at my waist, but because it was so quick, the acuteness of it, right, in that acute transverse myelitis, they told me that the chances of me walking were very, very low to none. So I did do physiotherapy after that, but the physiotherapy was a little bit of a joke because it was like, hey, move your legs.

Starting point is 00:06:10 Yeah, what are you doing? Yeah. Nothing's happening. Yeah, yeah. And I truly believe that I experienced what I would label as a miracle. And the doctors actually were the first ones to use the word miracle.

Starting point is 00:06:22 My parents are very hesitant to use that term. Strong word. They're very matter-of-fact people. In fact, if you ask them, they would say, you know, they never prayed for healing. They prayed that God would be glorified in whatever the outcome was, but that they actually never prayed directly for healing. They're just like very, you know, old school matter-of-fact people, which when I found out years later, I was like, well, thanks. Appreciate that one. But it was exactly one month from the day that I woke up. So I woke up on a Wednesday on January 8th and couldn't feel my legs. I woke up on February 8th of that year, one month exactly to the day I woke

Starting point is 00:06:58 up, got out of bed, walked over to my wheelchair and sat down. And that was it. Like, did it, did it, did it register though that you're like wait a minute i just walked to this thing so i remember sitting in my wheelchair knowing that something had happened and i couldn't tell you what it was because when literally i mean i spent a week in the hospital it was 11 days and so when they were doing tests um they would do things like uh i would wake up and there would be these pinpricks in my legs because they'd have taken a syringe and they'd have gone up and down the legs at the like, I guess, the points at where there would be responses for the nerves. That sounds fun.

Starting point is 00:07:33 Yeah, I know, right? And so I lived in the hospital for 11 days and then I went home and I had – so my bedroom was upstairs and they'd moved – my parents had moved my bedroom down onto the main floor of the house. I was sleeping on the couch because I couldn't go up and downstairs. And so I had basically for the last, you know, two weeks kind of fallen out of bed and crawled over my wheelchair and pulled myself up. So it had at that point become more or less like a pattern. Yes. So I knew something was different in the way that it had taken place that morning. And I couldn't tell you how long exactly it was.

Starting point is 00:08:15 Could have been five minutes, could have been 15 minutes. I don't know. I don't remember the sort of timeframe, but I remember looking down at my toe and I wiggled it. And so that was kind of this wait a minute moment. And I healed. Yeah. And I ended up running upstairs to get my parents. And then my mom cried while she made me run up and down the stairs a bunch of times. Yeah. So in terms of my own faith journey, that marked a very powerful, what I would say is a supernatural experience. Yeah. Did you have, I mean, you're young, you're 11 years old when this is happening, other than, you know, your parents taking you to church and saying like, oh, you know, like Jesus Christ is son of man. Like, did you have any real concept of your faith at that point? an 11-year-old, faith probably is. Me in particular, and this is why I think it's very important to,

Starting point is 00:09:06 when you look at things like, this is kind of a separate subject, but like faith healers and the- Faith healers? Yeah. Have you ever heard of faith healers like Benny Hinn? And they have these whole, these big conventions and they like, in the name of Jesus, they heal people with cancer and stuff. The devil will come out of you.

Starting point is 00:09:22 Yeah. It's very, it's very showcase-y. Yes. I have a little bit of a problem Yeah, it's very showcase-y. Yes. I have a little bit of a problem with that. I've probably seen that. And one of the reasons why I have a problem with that is because often it's tied to these people's faith, where they'll tell them, well, your faith wasn't enough. That's why you didn't get healed.

Starting point is 00:09:36 And knowing that 11-year-old Wes's faith, I mean, it was there, but I wouldn't have said it was strong. I wouldn't have said it was- Yeah, you're 11. Yeah, yeah, totally. So that marked a powerful supernatural experience in my life. But you would think that then that would like being raised in Christianity and then hearing medical professionals say, you know, you're going to be a paraplegic for the rest of your life. And then saying, we don't know why you're not a paraplegic anymore. And that would kind of solidify a lot of

Starting point is 00:10:02 the faith things for me. But I really struggled as a teen with some of the more intellectual questions, where I thought... What do you mean intellectual? Well, intellectual questions in terms of I understood that my parents had raised me to believe something. And I didn't think that it was the worst reason to believe it, but I also didn't think it was the best reason. And so questions of who was the historical Jesus? Where did the Bible come from? There are other worldview perspectives that also make truth claims. Just because I was raised in a particular one, does that necessitate that it's true? What about Islam? What about Mormonism? What about Buddhism or Hinduism? And luckily, I grew up in a household where, so I mentioned my parents were missionaries,

Starting point is 00:10:47 and my mom was actually a missionary. She grew up in India. And then I was born in Pakistan, spent a portion of my childhood in the Middle East. And we had things like the Bhagavad Gita on the living room shelf. We had the Book of Mormon. We had a copy of the Quran. Oh, wow. So you had access. Yeah. And there was always this, it wasn't overt. It was kind of an unspoken idea, at least how I understood it, is that these things are not scary. These things are not banned. We hold to a particular belief, but we hold to it on the basis that if it's true, it can stand up against scrutiny. And so go ahead. The Book of Mormon's there. Give it a read if you

Starting point is 00:11:24 want. And so when I was in high school,on's there give it a read if you want and so when i was in high school i wouldn't call it a crisis of faith i think that's way too over exaggerated for what took place yeah i'm just wrestling through some of these questions and part of that entailed you know i did read the quran cover to cover for the first time how was that um confusing i mean i would go on later in life to really study the Quran a little bit more in my formal education and university and studying world religions and stuff. I didn't realize at the time that the Quran was very different than the Bible, even though there's some crossover, in that the Bible is a little bit more chronological, where the first book is in the beginning and the last book is at the end.

Starting point is 00:12:07 Yes. The Quran is situated with the longest chapters at the front and the shortest chapters at the back. Hmm. So it reads a little bit more confusing. You don't necessarily start from the beginning and work through because the way that it's organized is just not the same way that something like and it's also one book more than the bible is 66 books

Starting point is 00:12:32 and it's 66 books it's written over a period of 1600 years on three different continents by close to 40 different authors in three different languages and so it's an anthology right you're dealing with different cultures different linguistic linguistic perspectives. Job is a very different book than the book of Acts, which is- Yeah, it's amazing, the range. Yeah, whereas the Quran is kind of situated in one particular vein of history. It's written in 7th century Arabia. It's written in a single language, Hadjiz script Arabic. And so even though it's claiming to hearken back to stories that predated and reflect on some of the stories that you find in the Bible of the prophets of Abraham, of Moses, of Jonah, even Jesus, John the Baptist,

Starting point is 00:13:19 Mary there and there, it's still very much one place at one time in a different way that the Bible is. Do you, like, so you're studying this when you're a teenager. Obviously, you're older now. You've been studying it for years and years and years. We were talking off camera, having a great conversation about all the different languages you look at and stuff like that. We'll get to that today. But I always ask the question of my different guys I've had in here, like, say, on the ancient history side of stuff who have some theories about things. I always ask the question of my different guys I've had in here, like say on the ancient history side of stuff who have some theories about things. I always ask them if their belief system, because that is a belief system too, ever they feel like it drives the results they end up getting, like a confirmation bias if you will. Do you ever think about that with respect to your faith?

Starting point is 00:14:02 Because that's obviously something very personal to you as well. Yeah. I mean we all have biases. I mean, find me the person who's neutral and you're not dealing with a real individual, right? So I'm totally fine with the biases that I hold, and particularly in regards to the confessional biases that I have. Confessional? Yeah. So confession of something saying like, Jesus Christ is God. That's a confessional statement based on like, so in Christianity, you literally have historic confessions, like the Nicene Creed is a confessional statement, or the Apostles' Creed, or there are some catechisms. There's the Westminster Catechism, the London Baptist 1689 Catechism.

Starting point is 00:14:46 These are different parts within the history of Christianity that state the belief systems. And so the idea is that those confessions and the idea of where they come from in church history, that has a vote and a voice, but ultimately, Scripture has the veto. The veto. The veto. So as a Protestant, as a historical Protestant, which is breaking away from the Roman Catholic Church in the... 14, 15. late 15th century, I follow in the footsteps of individuals like Luther and Calvin and Zwingli and Melanchthon in that they saw what was going on in the church and they reformed it back to what was original to the faith and sort of like scraping away some of the trappings,

Starting point is 00:15:41 the moss that had grown on the church. And so as part of that, there are certain belief systems that I hold to, one of which during the Protestant Reformation was sola scriptura, scripture alone. And so the idea of that was not that other things like tradition or experience don't have a place within the conversation, but that sola scriptura was that scripture is the sole infallible rule and faithful practice in the church. And so the idea is that ultimately, you're looking for the meaning that comes out of scripture. And I totally admit that that gives me a bias in the sense that I adhere to thinking that that is true, thinking that the claims, and particularly the worldview claims, that something like historic Christianity in the Bible,

Starting point is 00:16:32 that those are truth statements that can be verifiable, but that are true ultimately, and that does create a bias. But I think you can hold a... I mean, my field in biblical studies, there are a lot of secular scholars, and they also come in with a bias. And so it's not that it's like religious scholars versus secular scholars. I mean, we agree on a whole host of things, but often it's not the evidence and the rationale that we're disagreeing on. It's the conclusions that we then draw from that. Right. Yes. Okay. So within the Bible, it's obviously an – it's an unbelievable book towards any part of human history because it has so many stories that are relatable to life, so many teachings. And there is things

Starting point is 00:17:27 that there are things that are literally confirmed historical fact within there throughout the Bible for sure. But there's also a lot of stuff that it's like, we were talking about one off camera, like, all right, did Jonah really get swallowed by a fucking whale and live in there for three days? There's things that I've always looked at as like that's a lesson rather than a history furthermore you know and i always bring this up when i'm talking with guys about anything ancient texts i think you have to you know we're human beings so we're fallible we we we make mistakes there's there's some sort of there's a name for it but like the basic experiment where they have like 20 people sit in a circle and they each whisper a story into each other's ear. Yeah, the telephone game.

Starting point is 00:18:06 Right. Yes. Yeah, that's the way I'd put it. So by the end, it changes by whatever small percentage it is. Maybe it's like 5% or 7% or something. like the Bible is composed of all these stories that in many ways were passed down for, and many times like thousands of years, if not hundreds of years. And it's like, well, human bias can change it, story changing can change it. Do you ever struggle with, you know, what's real and what's not just on the base of like human fallibility with anything you read? And that doesn't just

Starting point is 00:18:43 include the Bible. That also includes other things you read from anything in what we would call ancient history. Yeah, definitely. I mean, in the UK, they call the telephone game Chinese whispers, and as a good PC Canadian, somehow that doesn't seem appropriate. But yeah, I mean, so just as a, to back up, I'm a trained historian. So that's what my education is in. And so I think as a trained historian, I'm perfectly comfortable with saying that historiography draws conclusions to the inference of the best explanation. And ideally, what you're looking for is cross-reference sources, ideally independent sources that can have different angles or perspectives on a particular story. And that's not always possible. Now, with the New Testament, we have a lot of that. But when

Starting point is 00:19:31 you're talking about something like the Old Testament, I would grant that there are different levels of probability to certain stories. Now, I don't think that means that they're not true. But I think if I put my historian hat on, I would say that something like Jonah being swallowed by the fish has a less probabilistic conclusion in terms of its truth than something like, and I would put the resurrection in a high category, simply because you have multiple independent lines of witness testimony that are indicating that Jesus lived, he was alive, he died, and then people saw him not dead. And so you have multiple lines of streams of evidence and individuals from different places at different times who are corroborating that fact. Now, you don't have that

Starting point is 00:20:17 with something like Moses coming down from Mount Sinai. That doesn't mean it's not true. It just means as a historian, I put things on a different level of probability. So yeah, I obviously, I would grant, and I would even say that some of the miracles of Jesus, when Jesus turns water into wine at Cana at the beginning of John's gospel, that has a lower probability of truth in the grand scheme of things from a historical perspective than the resurrection, because it's only being referred to as coming from one source. So, and I remember this morning when we were going to Dunkin' Donuts, we were talking about this a little bit, but obviously people watching right now weren't with us at Dunkin' Donuts, but

Starting point is 00:21:00 we were going through how, I believe in the the Quran they say Jesus wasn't crucified. They say someone else like stood in for him. Maybe it was Judas or something like that. But the evidence does point to the fact that – because like we know Jesus of Nazareth was a historical figure. That's all confirmed and everything. We know he did a lot of things and was a huge public figure, but like the evidence does point to the fact that he was actually crucified because of all the witnesses that were there up to and including like the Roman guards themselves not being able to mistake a guy who was so known like this. So therefore, if you also have, I'm extrapolating this, but if you also have evidence on the other end of that

Starting point is 00:21:40 of people who after witnessing him be killed on the cross witnessed him alive you know come out of the tomb that's why you're saying something like the resurrection has like good empirical data even though the actual event itself you know technically defies the laws of physics and humanity and pretty much every thing we do yeah sure i mean we call it a miracle for a reason right people don't usually rise from the dead. If they did, then it wouldn't be a miracle. But yeah, in the sense of it's a historical question in saying someone's alive, someone's empirically dead, but then they're being seen alive again. So what is the inference to the best explanation for that? And there are a number of conclusions based on secular materialism of, say, the mass hallucination theory or the

Starting point is 00:22:28 mistaken theory. You know, there are individuals in the past, historians who have tried to come up with alternative explanations. I just find them, and not just me, I mean, the vast majority of New Testament scholarship has said, believing or not, that they're really not very strong in the grand scheme of things. And that's why, so when I was investigating Islam, one of the main problems that I had was this historical problem, where in chapter 4, verse 157 of the Quran, it says that Jesus was not, neither was he killed, nor was he crucified, but it was made to appear to them. And then it says, actually, that those who believe it are not totally sure about this fact, which is... Why does it say that?

Starting point is 00:23:09 Your guess is as good as mine. In fact, the problem with that particular surah, that particular chapter of the Quran, is that in the Islamic sources, you have a lot of commentary. So you have other Islamic literature, you have the Quran, which is the holy book, then you have the Hadith and the Tafsir. And included in that group of literature are authoritative commentaries. But there is no authoritative commentary on this particular passage. And so there's a lot of different theories dependent on how you interpret that it was made to appear to them. So this is part of what we're talking about at Dunkin' Donuts. And for me, I mean, even if you go to the most skeptical iteration of historical biblical scholarship, if they can say basically, we can know very little,

Starting point is 00:23:52 if anything, about Jesus, they'll say, we do know that he was crucified under Pontius Pilate. And we know that because not only do we have these four biographies that we call the gospels, we have Paul and then Jude and James all testifying to it. And then you have other sources like the Jewish Romano historian Josephus. Josephus. How do you spell it? J-O-S-E-P-H-U-S, I believe. So Josephus was, he was one of the key historiographers, particularly commenting on Flavius Josephus. So he lived in the end of the first century, beginning of the second century. And he specifically recounts, not just mentioning Jesus's name, but also Jesus's brother, James,

Starting point is 00:24:37 and talks about the fact that James was stoned to death in Jerusalem. So there's a lot of historical credibility, not just on the historical Jesus, but that he was crucified, particularly crucified under Pontius Pilate. Other individuals, Tacitus, who's a key figure in how we get information about the Roman emperors. Tacitus, there were a few individuals. There was Tacitus, there was Plutarch, there was Cassius Dio, there was, you know, these individuals who were Roman historiographers within this period of Greco-Roman antiquity who were writing on people like the emperors. A lot of them mention – What years are we talking about with them writing approximately? So end of first century, beginning of second century.

Starting point is 00:25:22 Okay. So like 100, 200 years after Jesus? No. So within a 100-year period. So the first century is of second century okay so like 100 200 years after jesus no so within a 100 year period so the first century is when jesus lived so jesus lived till 33 a.d yeah 30 33 a.d and then you have these individuals commenting but that's pretty common i mean when we're talking on ancient writing we do have to be careful because we come from a hyper literate culture. So almost everybody is literate and we write a lot of stuff down. In the ancient world, at the height of the Roman empire, only about 10% of Rome proper was literate. And in somewhere

Starting point is 00:25:58 like Roman occupied Judea and Galilee, where Jesus was coming from, it probably never topped about 3%. Yeah, sounds right. And these were hyper-oral cultures. So actually, there's a lot of talk, no pun intended, in the writing of some of these famous orators in the ancient world, Greek and Roman, talking about how important it is that you memorize things. In fact, Socrates decried writing and reading because he said it would make people lazy and they wouldn't remember things. Socrates said this? Socrates said this. Yeah. Ironically, we only know that because Plato wrote it down in part of his dialogues. But Socrates says that people would get lazy if they read too much because they wouldn't be dependent on how good their memories could remember things.

Starting point is 00:26:51 Yeah. So there was a completely different perspective in the ancient world. And memorization was a whole part of this. You had this – God, I'm the opposite of that. That's crazy. I just looked at – yeah, you're right. I was looking that up.

Starting point is 00:27:06 But we live in a completely different culture, right? We have these supercomputers in our pockets. And so we know a lot about a little, but we don't know, did I say that right? Yeah, a little about a lot. We know a little about a lot. We don't know a lot about a little. Yeah. So because we can just look things up on Wikipedia, right?

Starting point is 00:27:24 Yeah. Like you just pulled up. But in the ancient world, that wasn't possible. And part of being and showing your education was that you could not only memorize things, but that you could paraphrase it very accurately. So someone like Josephus is writing and he is writing, so he writes a document called the Antiquities of the Jews, where he literally goes back and he tries to write this treatise of proving to the Romans, you shouldn't annihilate us because we, our origin goes back into ancient times as well. Were the Romans thinking about annihilating them at the time he was writing that? Yeah. So in 70 AD, so the problem with the Jews in Roman-occupied Judea is that they were constantly rebelling because they saw themselves as God's people, right? Israel was the promised land.

Starting point is 00:28:15 Now, they're being occupied by an imperial system and particularly by an emperor who's calling himself God. And at the time, who was the emperor that we're talking about, 70? Tiberius. Okay. Well, not – so Tiberius was during Jesus, but I think – Right after Tiberius. I'll take a look. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:28:35 And so – who is it? Does it say? I just see spouses right now. Oh, successor, Caligula. Yes. Okay. So they're quashing all of these rebellions. I mean, this is where you get the group called the Zealots.

Starting point is 00:28:52 So there were different groups, factions of Judaism. So if you ever read the Gospels, you're going to come up with groups like the Sadducees and the Pharisees and the Zealots. The Zealots were basically, I mean, there's a reason why we have that word in English. We've kind of imported it, is they were a group of very hyper-religious Jews who just basically believed that they were going to force the Romans out. And so in fact, one of Jesus' disciples is Simon the Zealot. And so there's varying degrees as to like how intense his zealotry was. Part of the complicatedness of who he was, was that one of the other disciples was

Starting point is 00:29:34 a tax collector. Levi or Matthew was a tax collector. And the tax collectors were literally the opposites in terms of the political spectrum from the zealots. So the tax collectors are talked about very unfavorably in the gospels and in a lot of Jewish literature from this time, because they were the sellouts. Not only were they seen as working for Rome, but they were actually collecting the money from the people that was funding the occupation. And so- Don't tread on me. Yeah. So there were lots of, there was lots of political turmoil in the first century, which is why when the Pharisees asked the question to Jesus of, should you pay taxes to Caesar? It's not actually about

Starting point is 00:30:16 taxes. It's about moral compromise. But anyways, so going back to your question about the uprisings, there were a number of uprisings immediately after Jesus' death. And the one that really hit its peak culminated in the destruction of Jerusalem. So the Romans go in in 70 AD, and they say, we've had enough of this. They sack Jerusalem, and they destroy the temple. So the temple in Jerusalem is destroyed in 70 AD and never built back. So that's the temple mount that the Dome of the Rock is on right now in Jerusalem. Okay. So this is under... Wow, there were... I'm just looking through the Roman emperors. There were a ton like in a very short time span. A lot of these guys were getting whacked, I guess.

Starting point is 00:31:03 So this is under Vespasian? Yes, yes, yes. Under Vespasian. Wow, there were like 10 between him and Tiberius. Yeah. Shit. There was a lot of turnover for various reasons in the Roman imperial system. And this becomes actually a very concrete number, is usually when we talk about dating Christian documents,

Starting point is 00:31:24 particularly the New Testament, it's either a question of, is it pre-70 or is it post-70? Because the destruction of the temple becomes such a big event, and Jesus predicts it in the Gospels. So part of the... Yeah. So Jesus in the Gospels says that the temple will be destroyed and that no stone will be left on top of another. And then he uses that as an analogy to say, destroy my, destroy this temple and I will raise it up in three days. So he uses it as this, like, because his disciples are saying, Jesus, look at the temple, how great it is. And he says, yeah, but you know, the temple is finite. And they're like, Jesus, what do you mean the temple is finite? And he uses that as an example of saying, no, I am the true temple. Because the temple is the

Starting point is 00:32:10 presence of God on earth. And so he's saying that, no, it's not about this building. I'm going to be that. And actually the beginning of John's gospel says that. It says in John 1, 14, that the word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. And the word that's used there in Greek is literally he tabernacled among us. And the tabernacle was before the temple was built. It was the place where God's presence dwelt in the Holy of Holies. So there's, Jesus plays on this and predicts the destruction of the temple. And so some scholars say, well, Jesus couldn't have done that pre-70 AD. So these gospels have to be written after and it's been imposed back on the mouth of Jesus. It's part of the argumentation for dating them later.

Starting point is 00:32:55 But there was a lot of rebellion going on in this period. Also because that area, the Holy Land, is just throughout human history i mean there's a reason it's called the holy land there's a reason everyone fights over it there's been wars there and everything so even when you have something as large as like the greater roman empire that at this point is controlling like all of europe into africa and into asia like this is just one area of it and there's a lot of different cultures there that are fighting over things that are no pun intended like biblical to them so it makes a lot of sense that that there's uprising but it's also you know the fact that you have someone like a jesus of nazareth living kind of smack dab

Starting point is 00:33:37 in the middle of that time period is also i don't know patternistically interesting as well, because he, you know, he dies. It's not like Christianity as a broad religion with many following is born the next day. It is born, but it's not like, you know, you had like millions of people like, fuck yeah, we love Jesus. That took a long time. So you keep on bringing up the gospels. I think this is a really good place to kind of go to the history with that. But we have the four main Gospels in the Bible. There are other Gospels that are written. We can kind of get to that. But can you just walk me through the timeline of when they were written and who wrote them and how they came upon the stories within there? Yeah. So this is a really debated topic within New Testament studies. I would take a very early

Starting point is 00:34:26 dating of the vast majority of the New Testament with some caveats. So I would date Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Matthew, Mark, Luke, what are sometimes referred to as the synoptic gospels. So meaning that you can put them side by side and you have similar stories, right? Synos meaning to put side by side and then optic meaning to see. So seeing them side by side. And there's an agreement upon the fact that there's some literary dependence from those three gospels, that the three authors of those gospels are using each other in some way for source. Okay.

Starting point is 00:35:02 Literarily. And then John is off on his own because John kind of does his own thing. Now, I would put the synoptics, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, pre-70, I would put them pretty close to the earliest one. For argument's sake, I would say that Mark is the earliest, which is kind of the general scholarship recognition. Mark writes first. He's probably writing anywhere between 10 to 30 years after Jesus. And then Luke and John are writing afterwards. And then I would actually put, sorry, I said that wrong. Mark writes first, then Matthew and Luke. 10 to 30 years from Mark, after Jesus. anywhere between 50 and 70. See, the thing is that the author of the Gospel of Luke

Starting point is 00:35:51 is a traveling companion of Paul. And part of Luke's writing is that he writes the Gospel, the Gospel of Luke, and he writes the Book of Acts. They're kind of like part one and part two. Yes. And a big line of reasoning, and I'm taking this from a scholar named Richard Balcombe, who taught in the UK for a long time. I think he's still there. I think he's an adjunct at Cambridge at the moment. And he argues, which I think is right, that Luke is making this kind of articulation of Peter and Paul as apostle brothers in the faith. And that's kind of this concrete argument in the book of Acts.

Starting point is 00:36:31 The book of Acts starts, you know, Jesus, he ascends up to heaven, he's taught people for 40 days after his resurrection. And then you have the disciples, particularly Peter, going out and preaching this news. And then you have the persecutor Saul of Tarsus, who then becomes a convert, and he becomes the apostle to the Gentiles. So he starts preaching to the Gentiles. And so there's this kind of thread throughout that these are two individuals who are very different, but have this kind of same goal in mind. Now, we know from external sources that are outside the Bible that both Peter and Paul are martyred in Rome around 64 to 66 AD. So... One of them was like crucified upside down?

Starting point is 00:37:24 Yeah, yeah. Is that paul no peter peter was crucified upside down yeah the story is that he says um that he you know they say we're going to crucify you and he says you know it's uh it's too great of an honor to die like my savior and so they're like well we can fix that um god they were so nice i know right the right? The Romans always put a nice little bow on everything. I guess so. So part of the argument about this, though, is that Luke actually records the deaths of a number of individuals. He records the deaths of Stephen. He records the death of James. Who was Stephen?

Starting point is 00:37:58 Stephen was one of sort of the – he wasn't one of the 12 disciples, but he was the first martyr. So he got stoned to death very early on in the book of Acts by the Jews. Yeah. For, you know, blasphemy, you know, preaching that Jesus was who he said he was. And so Luke actually records these deaths, but conspicuously doesn't record the deaths of Peter and Paul. And the argument is that if he knew about them, it would have been the perfect ending to the book. Yeah. Because it would have put the capstone on the whole argument that he's trying to make. So whatever's going on, Luke needs to be written before their death. It needs to have concluded

Starting point is 00:38:41 before the death of Peter and Paul to make sense. And Luke is definitely using Mark. And Matthew, there's a question as to, is Matthew using Luke as a source or not? So going back to your original question, Luke and Matthew, sorry, John and Matthew are disciples. They're part of Jesus's 12 cohort, the apostles. Mark is not, and Luke is not. So Luke is a traveling companion of Paul, like I said before. And Luke, right at the beginning of the gospel, there's a preface. And he says, hey, I'm not an eyewitness. I didn't see these things. But he says, I am writing an orderly account, drawing up,

Starting point is 00:39:27 relying on eyewitnesses. And he writes so that both Luke and Acts are actually letters that he writes to a guy named Theophilus. So he says at the beginning of the Gospel of Luke, most excellent Theophilus, I'm writing you this account of the things that you believed and that many others have undertaken to write up an account of. And he says, I'm writing up an orderly account and he's interviewing eyewitnesses. He's right up at the preface. He's saying, I wasn't there, but I'm doing the due diligence to make sure I get the references from those who were there. Guys, if you're still watching this video and you haven't yet hit that subscribe button, please take two seconds and go hit it right now. Thank

Starting point is 00:40:09 you. And there is actually some connection. It's a purely eyewitness account. Yeah. Yeah. And, and saying like, he actually parallels some other ancient writers. Um, so there are like Lucian is an ancient historiographer. And then there are some who predate Lucian, who talk about Josephus is one of them who these guys talk about how you should write history. And they particularly say it's very important that you A, interview eyewitnesses, and B, write up an account. And they use this very specific word, which is the same word that Luke uses. Now, I don't know if Luke is aware of individuals like Lucian. I mean, Josephus comes afterwards.

Starting point is 00:40:50 But there are other historiographers, Aristophanes, for tradition that appears to be the way that you write ancient historiography and biography in this time period. And he's going to lengths to try to communicate these things. And so he understands. He wasn't there. He was an eyewitness. But he's going to make sure he's getting to the source. And we see that throughout the Gospel of Luke. It's easily, I think John has components of this, but it's easily one of the best examples of ancient historiography in terms of biography in particular. It's up there with individuals like Tacitus and Tacitus, Cassio Dio, individuals who are writing about other individuals from the time.

Starting point is 00:41:49 Now, at this time, obviously, on the one hand, down in the Holy Land, especially, you have the Jewish faith, which we have an understanding of what they believe. The difference was that they just didn't recognize Christ as the Savior at this point. You have the earliest days of the growing Christian faith, but on top of all of it is the aforementioned Roman Empire, where at this time, it's a pagan religious empire. So they believe in a bunch of different gods. We don't have to go into all the details, but feel free to go into whatever you want to. And they continue to believe that, and they actually, as we'll probably cover at some point here, they persecute Christians along the way. I mean, they put Paul and Peter to death over it, and before eventually

Starting point is 00:42:35 turning to Christianity. And the turn to Christianity is what really fascinates me, and it's something I have a lot more to learn about, but I've looked at it a bunch already, and I'd love to have some people in here who are some experts on it, but you have this Council of Nicaea in the 4th century. It was like 3... 325. Yeah, 325. So, this is where my brain wires get, like, blocked a little bit because you have a power structure the roman government led by the emperor who now sees this new growing idea where there's many christians within his empire and he's going oh shit we're having trouble putting putting a button on this like they really believe in this guy jesus christ and what happened and by the way we kind of put him to death that's not a

Starting point is 00:43:23 good look so they have this big meeting with a lot of different people and they dictate guess what we are now the holy roman empire we believe in christianity and here's everything that that happened and the question is you have power hungry men in this meeting who are now dictating, taking legitimate pieces of history, but deciding what we're going to tell the public about or what we're going to make the book. And the reason I bring this up is because within this meeting and subsequent, you know, practicing of the religion throughout the empire afterwards, there was a decision made where these are the four gospels we use, not these other gospels that we found as well. And one of the alleged gospels there, but there's all of them are interesting, is that, you know, like Mary Magdalene had a gospel and she's not written about in great terms, or at least in implied great terms in the four gospels they chose,

Starting point is 00:44:22 as opposed to in her gospel and in other gospels written. It's like, yo, she wasn't like a whore. She was Jesus's companion, perhaps his wife. And then it gets into like, oh, does Jesus have a kid or something like that? That's kind of a step farther. But like, what do you make of the fact that the religion, which you are not a part of the Catholic church, right? You're a part of Protestant, but all Christianity- Part of my heritage. Exactly. All Christianity branched off from that as we'll get to martin luther later i wanted to put a pin in that but like what what do you think of the fact that like there are political power structures that took this history and decided what people are going to see and then basically said this is why we believe that way, because they also at this meeting allegedly decided there we're going to make Jesus divine, even though I agree with you. I think that there's historical

Starting point is 00:45:10 evidence before that that points to people saying, oh yeah, no, no, he is divine. He did rise from the dead. So some corrective history there. So you had a period of persecution which was dispersed that started basically right away. I mean, Nero, who was one of the Roman emperors in the first century, is famous for burning Christians to light his garden's paths. To light his garden's paths? Yeah, he would burn them as torches. And the Christians were these really easy targets because they were these unusual people who became a really easy target for – like a scapegoat for the problems. Wait, so he would – hold on a minute, I'm still stuck on the garden thing. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:45:47 So would he, like, stick them on a stake and hold them like a tiki torch? Yeah, the story is that they would be tied to stakes along the rows of his gardens, and then they would be lit to lit the gardens at night. But remember, this is the guy who burned Rome, right? He was understandably crazy. Yeah, he was a real motherfucker. He was known to be a little bit nuts, as were some other Roman emperors. Sure.

Starting point is 00:46:08 So you have this era of persecution, but it's really dispersed. So it's worse in some places, better in others. So it's a few emperors before Constantine. You have a guy named Diocletian. And Diocletian has a universal era of persecution. Now, even before that, so one of our earliest mentions of Christianity outside of the Bible from an imperial source is a letter from Pliny the Younger to the Emperor Trajan. Because you have these people running around who are calling themselves Christians, and the Roman government system is

Starting point is 00:46:44 trying to figure out what to do with them. because they're saying very strange things. They're saying things like, your gods don't exist. And this doesn't bode well under the ancient culture of Greco-Roman antiquity. And so I mentioned before they become easy scapegoats. There's an ancient historian named Tertullian, and he has this line where he says, if the Nile River is too high, or the Tiber River, which is the river in Rome, is too low, the cry will ring out the Christians, the lions. And the reason for that is because when there are, say, famines or floods or things like that, and you're trying to figure out, okay, well, why might this have happened? One thing you can point to is where there are these crazy religious people running around saying that the gods don't exist. And so if I'm in Athens and there are

Starting point is 00:47:35 people saying that Athena doesn't exist, that's probably ticking Athena off. And so why might there be a flood? Well, it's because of these guys. So they were an easy target for persecution. And in fact, when Pliny the Younger writes to Trajan, he says, I don't know what to do with these people. I torture them, and they don't, you know. They keep going. Yeah. And he basically is saying, like, hey, emperor, am I doing everything right? And he's like, yes, you're doing everything right.

Starting point is 00:48:02 And so we have this kind of evidence of persecution. And actually, that's an important letter, because early on, he says, you yes, yes, you're doing everything right. And so we have this kind of evidence of persecution. And actually, that's an important letter because early on, he says, you know, these people meet, they meet early in the morning, and they sing a hymn as Christ to a God. And so we have this kind of early evidence of people already worshiping Jesus as God under – very early on within that time period. But so you have these dispersed eras of persecution, but that really comes to its fruition and head under Diocletian where he's like, I'm going to wipe these guys off. to go into the equivalent of your like local town hall and you have to take a pensive pinch of incense and you have to offer it as a uh an offering on the altar of caesar and you have to say the words caesar at curios caesar is lord and the reason they did this specifically was because one of the earliest confessions of the christian faith was jesus jesus is lord and so they knew that christians if they were believing christians would not say this

Starting point is 00:49:12 but if you don't say it you don't get this piece of paper that they called a libelus and if you didn't have a libelus you couldn't buy yourself and so this was one of the ways along with you know weeding out people who they thought might be Christians, throwing them in prison. So people would – hold on a minute. So people wouldn't say that to pass – and I don't mean to be like nonchalant about it. But I would think if I were a Christian, yes, it feels sacrilegious to not say that in that way and say someone else is Lord. But I would also think, and I'm trying to put myself in their shoes, like, okay, if I live my life practicing the teachings of Jesus and I'm a good Christian and whatever, and this empire is trying to persecute me and potentially kill me, meaning I'm not going to be able to continue to spread the good word or whatever if I'm dead, I feel like Jesus would let you say something else just to kind of pass off, but they didn't feel that way. No, I mean, Paul in his letters says to live is Christ and to die is gain.

Starting point is 00:50:15 Because if you are a Christian, if you truly believe that Jesus is who he says he is, then he died for you, you can live for him, but ultimately he paid the ultimate sacrifice on your behalf, dying on the cross and taking your sins. You dying as a confession of your faith, becoming a martyr, not that you're pursuing martyrdom. The early Christians weren't pursuing martyrdom, but they weren't afraid of martyrdom either. Right. And so this was the perspective of early Christians. And it actually became a controversy because some Christians did have the perspective that you're articulating,

Starting point is 00:50:51 where they would say, yeah, sure, I said Caesar is Lord, but I didn't really mean it. Or sure, they asked me if I had, say, Christian documents, and I did, but I lied for the sake of carrying on these documents. Now, Constantine, before his conversion, he decriminalizes a bunch of things, including during the Edict of Milan in 312 AD, he decriminalizes Christianity. Now, he doesn't do that solely, but in part and parcel to some of the other stuff that he's decriminalizing with the addictive tolerance, Christianity gets lumped in there. And now all of a sudden, it's no longer illegal to be a Christian. And so the Christians are coming out of the woodwork, and this actually becomes a controversy within the church called the Donatist controversy, where you have... Donatist? Yeah, Donatist. And part of that is that there was a group of people who had, say, not given up Christian documents,

Starting point is 00:51:47 who maybe were a little bit glib with the truth in terms of, are you a Christian? And they maybe weren't as transparent. And they were called the Trotadors. And this is actually where we get the word traitor from. And now they're all part of groups of church communities. And remember, church in Greek, just ekklesia, just means congregation. So they're part of these congregations, these local congregations. But there are these other groups who have said that they're gonna give up Christ and say, well, we didn't really mean it. But then there are also people who have come out of prison, who have lost limbs for their faith, or have had family members who died as martyrs. And this becomes a big problem in the church. And so they have to figure it out. And it's one of the earliest controversies that

Starting point is 00:52:35 took place. It's called the Donatist controversy. Yeah, I just, I pulled this up while you were saying, I just want to read this so people have background. Donatism was a, I guess it became a Christian sect leading to a schism in the church in the region of the Church of Carthage from the 4th to the 6th centuries. Donatists argued that Christian clergy must be faultless for their ministry to be effective and their prayers and sacraments to be valid. Donatism had its roots in the long-established Christian community of the Roman province, Africa, Proconsularis, present-day Tunisia, the northeast of Algeria and the western coast of Libya, and Mauritania and Tengitana, roughly with the northern part of present-day Morocco,

Starting point is 00:53:10 and the persecutions of Christians under Diocletian. Named after the Berber Christian bishop Donatist Magnus, Donatism flourished during the 4th and 5th centuries. Donatism mainly spread among the indigenous Berber population, and Donatists were able to blend Christianity with many of the Berber local customs. it's an it's it's an offshoot but they had a clear at the front end different idea on on i guess how the church is supposed to be carried out well it was particularly um what happens if you have a an elder within your local congregation who say has baptized you but they offered an inch of incense. Sorry, I didn't say that right. Offered an inch, offered a pinch of incense, easy for me

Starting point is 00:53:50 to say, on the altar of Caesar. Is your baptism legitimate? That was the question in terms of that. And so part of this theological question was, where is the power of your baptism? Is it in your confession of faith and the actual immersion, or is it in the person who has been set aside as clergy who has done this to you? Because you had these individuals who, they didn't become martyrs when maybe the other groups thought they should become martyrs, and now they're leaders in the church. So that was part of this Donatist controversy. Now, this is all leading up to the Council of Nicaea, I remember. Yes. So you have...

Starting point is 00:54:29 I was waiting in anticipation. Yeah, yeah, I know. I could see the timeline. Let me just say right off the bat, the Council of Nicaea, the reason it was called was to deal with an issue called Arianism. So there was a guy named Arius, who was a minister in North Africa, and he believed that Jesus was God, but he believed that Jesus was created by the Father and the Godhead. The Godhead? Yeah. So in Trinitarian belief, the Godhead is usually the term that's referred to as, you know, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Starting point is 00:55:07 In the one being of God, there are three co-equal, co-eternal persons, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. That's sometimes referred to as the Godhead. So one of the earliest heresies in Christianity was a belief called modalism. Modalism. That believed that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit were actually the same beings and persons reflected in different modes. So in the Old Testament, the Father was God, then the Father becomes Jesus, dies on the cross in the mode of Jesus, and then now in the church age exists in the mode of the Holy Spirit. Bravo. Okay.

Starting point is 00:55:49 Yeah. And so early Christianity jumped on this and they were like, this doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense philosophically. It doesn't make any sense theologically. It would mean that Jesus is praying to himself. That's not what Trinitarians believe. And ultimately it led to what is referred to as patropationalism, that the father died on the cross in the person of Jesus. Oh, okay. And they said, we don't believe that. Okay. And his motivations are actually, I think, correct in that he's trying to guard against modalism, which had been, I think, appropriately condemned by the church as something that doesn't actually reflect what we see within the scriptures.

Starting point is 00:56:34 But while his motivations might have been correct, his method was then to kind of overcompensate and develop this theology where the Father creates Jesus at a point in time, and so the Son and the Spirit did not exist eternally as God, whereas God the Father existed eternally as God. And so his bishop, his kind of the guy in charge over him, actually says like, hey, this is not true. Too much. It's not accurate from what we see and they actually hold a mini council and they condemn him there but what year is that um so this is like uh probably it's between uh 320 and 325 okay but it's leading up to the council of nicaea so this is the

Starting point is 00:57:23 topic of the council of nicaea the topic of the Council of Nicaea. The topic of the Council of Nicaea actually had nothing to do with the books of the Bible. So the books of the Bible had already been established centuries before. Not for the Roman Empire though. What do you mean? Meaning this is where the Roman Empire makes – officially kind of makes their shift to like, yeah, we're Christians now, right? So it isn't. It isn't. No.

Starting point is 00:57:49 So Constantine converts to Christianity, but he doesn't make Christianity the imperial religion of Rome. Right. Not lawfully. Yeah. So that's under Theodosius, which is after him. But it becomes accepted as a result of this. It becomes decriminalized. Yes.

Starting point is 00:58:06 Previous to this, before he even converts. Right. But I'm saying like the Council of Nicaea now gets to, yo, our emperor's converting, by the way, Christians, it's cool. You're decriminalized. You can be here and we kind of support it. You don't have to be a Christian, but that's fair to say, right? Yeah. But the caveat to that is that the Council of Nicaea doesn't even talk about the books of scripture. So nothing at the Council of Nicaea doesn't even talk about the books of Scripture. So nothing at the Council of Nicaea has anything to do with the canon of Scripture. That's already an established fact. When?

Starting point is 00:58:33 Oh, within the second century. Within the second century, you— But for the Roman Empire, though? Because they were still torturing Christians at that time. But the Roman Empire is still pagan by the time you get the Edict of Milan and the decriminalization of Christianity. I know. That's what I'm saying. So how would they have – how would the Roman Empire have gotten along with the acceptance of what the gospels are? Oh, they don't. No, this is established by Christianity. Yes. I know that. So Christians already have the 27 books that we call the New Testament. And who would you say established that? It may not be

Starting point is 00:59:06 one person, but what people said, yo, this is what we're going with. So there are lots of canon lists within the early church. So because the earliest Christians were Jews, there was an understanding that the promises that God makes, you might've heard the word covenant before. So the covenant that God makes are always followed up by written documentation. So God makes a covenant with Moses and you have literal inscription in the tablets, right? And then you have the law, you have the Torah, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Numbers that come together with that. And then when you have the prophets declaring things to the people and declaring truths that God is telling the people of Israel, sometimes it literally says, inscribe this on a tablet, write this on a scroll.

Starting point is 00:59:51 And so there was always an understanding between the promises of God and written documentation that led up to that. And so when you have Jesus come on the scene and he establishes the new covenant, which was prophesied in Jeremiah 31, 31, which says, God says, I'm going to make a new covenant with my people, and I'm going to describe the law in their hearts. So they're not going to need the written law in the same way. They're going to live in a different way. And so that's the cultural expectation during Jesus's days that the Messiah would come and he would establish this new covenant. So Jesus predicts this in the sense that I would argue he fulfills these expectations and these prophecies, and then

Starting point is 01:00:32 he predicts his own death and resurrection, and then he pulls it off as a sign and a symbol that he's overcome death and that he's been approved by God. And then I think the natural and organic question that people would ask these early Christians who are Jews themselves is, okay, we have the covenant, where are the books? Because the Old Testament was a story in search of a conclusion. Because there was this idea that you have these, well, there are 39 books in our Old Testament, a Protestant Old Testament. They're the same books in a jewish uh it's called a tanakh the tour the nevi and the ketabim right um the same number of books but they put them in a different order so oh i didn't know that yeah so they um they have

Starting point is 01:01:16 the same number of books as the jewish uh alphabet as the hebrew alphabet um and so they do things like they group all the prophets together whereas the the Christians divided them up. We have 1 and 2 Chronicles, 1 and 2 Kings. The Jews just have Chronicles and Kings. And so if you were to go out and you were to buy a Hebrew copy of what would be the Hebrew scriptures, what we would call the Old Testament, they would call the Tanakh, the last book in that Bible is going to be Chronicles, whereas the last book in the Christian Bible is going to be Malachi. And the reason for that is we've organized it more or less chronologically. He's the last prophet, whereas the Jews had this idea that they ended the book with the Davidic reign and the expectation that someone would come and fulfill that. The

Starting point is 01:02:04 Messiah is coming. And so interestingly enough, the only two books and the expectation that someone would come and fulfill that. The Messiah is coming. And so interestingly enough, the only two books in the Bible that start with a genealogy are Chronicles and Matthew. And I think the reason for that is because I believe, and I'm not alone here, there's an idea within biblical scholarship. Matthew knows that he's writing one of these documents that would have been considered the graphe, the writing as part of the scripture that would have been included within the scriptures that followed up the covenant. And so where does he start? He starts where the Bible that he has leaves off. It starts with the Davidic expectation, tracing Jesus back in that lineage. And so we see this cultural

Starting point is 01:02:46 expectation. So even though it would, we kind of have this idea that somebody somewhere got together and voted on books or tried to reach some consensus about books. And realistically, that never actually took place in history. It was a lot slower and a lot more organic than that. And there were disagreements on some books and not others. So very, very early on, you have the Gospels. Nobody disagrees on the Gospels. Nobody disagrees on that. No, everybody agrees that these are the four books.

Starting point is 01:03:19 What? Everybody? Well, all the Christians. So here's the thing. The disciples of Jesus had disciples. And those are individuals who we call the apostolic fathers. Yeah. Because they have a direct association with- It's like a bloodline almost. Yeah. Yeah. It's like the paper trail that goes back to the chain of custody that goes back to

Starting point is 01:03:40 Jesus. Yes. The way to put it. And part of this is that we have individuals who know Mark, and we have individuals who know Mark who say, hey, this Mark guy is not a disciple, but he's a traveling companion of Peter. And he follows Peter around and he writes what Peter says. And so we have a number of individuals like this, Irenaeus, Polycarp, Papias. And so they give us this unanimous confirmation within this early community, because it's not of our big community at this point, in saying, okay, well, we know who the authors of the Gospels are, and we have this direct chain of custody paper trail that goes back to the earliest Jesus community. And one of the criteria for deciding, okay, well, what goes in

Starting point is 01:04:21 this group of documents, this testamentum, right? That's the word we get. So it's actually the word covenant. So in Greek, the word testament is diatheke, which is covenant. So it's the old covenant, new covenant. In Latin, it's testamentum. So that's where we get Old Testament, New Testament. And they say, well, we know who the earliest Jesus community were. We know who were the disciples of Jesus. We know who the disciples of the disciples of Jesus were. And so we can trace these back. So when other gospels pop up, Gospel of Mary, Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Judas, and they're analyzed, they know the people who are connected with this community. So they can look at the Gospel of Thomas and say, this isn't from Thomas,

Starting point is 01:05:06 A, because we know people who know Thomas, and B, the content in it doesn't reflect anything accurate in its representation of either who the disciples were or who the Jesus, who we know and have known from this community to be. And so when I talk about unanimous agreement on the gospels, I'm talking about the earliest Jesus community that actually had a direct succession from either someone who knew Jesus or someone who knew someone who knew Jesus.

Starting point is 01:05:38 So we have this unanimous agreement on the gospels and we have this unanimous agreement on the letters of Paul, but we have some disagreement about some of the other books. If for no other reason, then there are a lot of books floating around with very distinct names on them. Like the book of Enoch, are you talking about? Like stuff like that? No, that's actually previous. We can talk about that if you want. Yeah, yeah. Well, let's not get you off topic, but we'll come back to that. Yeah. So there are a lot of letters and writings with names

Starting point is 01:06:05 associated with John and Peter. And so you have, okay, we have a... Common name. Yeah, right. Well, you have the Gospel of John, but then you have 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John, and then you have the Acts of John, and you have the Revelation of John, and you have the Epistles of John. Like, you have to figure this out. So there are some books where the church is like, okay, 24 of the 27, we can say we know where these come from, but we gotta make sure we do our due diligence so that we're not recognizing books that are not an accurate representation of the actual authors. And so that's why it took the dust to settle a little bit more on 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John, 1st and 2nd Peter, Jude, and James. Because they're like, we got to make sure these books

Starting point is 01:06:54 are actually connected to the people whose names. How did they do that? The same way they did it with the other ones. So they looked back and looked at both the content and the provenance of the actual documents. So where are they being written? Who can we connect them with? Where are these documents coming from? And what communities are they coming out of? So there was no actual criteria for canonicity, but they did ask questions. And so these are in scholarship sometimes referred to as apostolicity, which is, does it have a connection with an apostle or

Starting point is 01:07:32 someone who knew an apostle? Orthodoxy, which has nothing to do with the Eastern Orthodox, Greek Orthodox Church. Orthos means right, and doxa means, in a number of its different semantic ranges, teaching. So orthodoxy means, does it reflect the right teaching in that the apostles established churches, and they've been teaching in the churches the things that have been handed down from those who Jesus gave the authority to teach. And so when we look at some of the content of these things, so for example, the last line of the Gospel of Thomas has Peter looking at Jesus and saying, hey, Mary's here. Get Mary out because women are not worthy of life. And so Jesus says, don't worry,

Starting point is 01:08:17 I'm going to make her into a male that resembles you, male. And the last line of the Gospel of Thomas is, every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven. Like transgenderism? So it's... Un-fuck-able. It's complicated, right? They were before their time, right? So the early church looked at this kind of content and then they went, what is this? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:08:37 Like, that's not... We know what the teaching of Jesus sounds like. It ain't that. And so they would both look at the content and look at the provenance in terms of the actual communities that they were coming out of. So you had apostolicity and you had orthodoxy, and then you also had the third criteria, which was catholicity. Once again, nothing to do with Roman Catholics. Cata means concerning and holos means the whole, concerning the whole universal church. And so they're saying, okay, is there enough unanimous

Starting point is 01:09:04 agreement from the church universal, from the churches that were established by the apostles, that we can say, these are being read widely within church communities that actually reflect a provenance of going back to the earliest Jesus community? Right. Yeah. Within those communities though, but the thing I always worry about, and to be fair, I worry about this with everything. It's not just – we happen to be talking about Christianity right now, but I'd make the same argument for – or raise the same possibility I should say for literally anything that points to any form of religion or historical understanding of the history of the world. have a, call it closed-end community. You have a handful of people who are left behind after Jesus, who knew him, who are to carry on his word as he wanted, as he would have wanted it. You have to understand that even if they may have been really stand-up people and done a good job, there's still a human bias that occurs where it's like, well, I'll take that,

Starting point is 01:10:06 I'll take that. He wouldn't have minded, right? That could still happen, no? Yeah, yeah. No, and I think that's a good observation from a lay perspective and from a historical perspective. And one thing that's very unique about some of these documents is there's a criteria within historiography that's referred to as the criterion of embarrassment. And so the idea is if there is something within the writing that reflects very poorly on either the authors or the people connected with the authors, it is a good assumption to say that it is probably true. Not that it's always true, but that's probably true because you're not going to put your, right, this is what I was, we were talking earlier about some of the perspectives of prophethood in Islam versus Christianity.

Starting point is 01:10:49 My Muslim friends have a problem with the prophets looking as bad as they do in the Old Testament because they're like, a representation of a man of God wouldn't look like that. And they, you and I were talking off camera about this earlier, Muslims view prophets as like a form of divine, like a form of relative perfection. Or at least there's an understanding within, say, Sunni orthodoxy that I don't think it's not all Muslims, but sort of historical Sunni orthodoxy within Islam would largely have an understanding of prophets being close to sinless, if not sinless. And so if you have someone like King David, who in the Bible, he's a murderer, he's an adulterer.

Starting point is 01:11:30 He sleeps with Bathsheba and then Bathsheba's husband comes back from war. Is this the same David with Goliath? Yeah. Well, he did kill Goliath. He killed Goliath, but that was a good move, right? Yeah. So he kills Goliath, he goes on, he's a great king,

Starting point is 01:11:44 but he always has this problem of, he just loves the ladies too much, right? Yeah. So he kills Goliath. He goes on. He's a great king, but he always has this problem of he just loves the ladies too much, right? Nothing wrong with that. So the story is he's standing on the roof. He sees Bathsheba. She's on her roof and she's bathing. And he's like, oh, I like that. And so he calls her in and he sleeps with her. But her husband is fighting on the front lines for him.

Starting point is 01:12:02 And her husband comes home and he's like, oh, this is a problem. So he tries to put her husband even more on the front lines so that he dies. Please die. And then he dies, right? And so he's like purposefully like micromanaging the death of this woman's husband

Starting point is 01:12:18 so that he can basically, because she becomes pregnant and that's problematic because her husband's- Oh no. Yeah, he brings him back from war and wants her husband to sleep with her so that he might think that he got her pregnant. And he's such a devotee of David that he won't go home. He sleeps in front of the palace gate because he's like, you know, my comrades in arms. They're out on the battlefields.

Starting point is 01:12:43 They're in the trenches. His wife's getting knocked up by the king. Oh my God. So all that to say, from a historian perspective, we look at this and we're like, hey, this is like the good guy. David's the good guy. He's the king, right? But he is a bit of a scumbag. Like, he does these things. So we can look at that and we can say, especially within the ancient Near East, you never make the king look bad. So in this regard, that's probably true. These events probably took place because you look at all of the other ancient Near Eastern, the Mesopotamian, the Egyptian kings, the pharaohs, and they're always going above and beyond to try to make them look good. And so in the criterion of embarrassment, when you look at something like the Gospels, what's really interesting is – so it's sometimes – I like to refer to it as the disciples because they're like not getting anything Jesus is saying.

Starting point is 01:13:42 Jesus is like, hey, I'm teaching you these things. And they're like, oh, okay. Like they continually fail to understand what Jesus is saying. He's predicting his own death. He's saying, he's literally saying, I will be handed over to the authorities and will die. And then when it happens, they're like, we didn't see this coming. And then they all, and they abandoned him. And then Peter, who's like, you know, number two to Jesus, right? He's like, he's the person who at the Last Supper says, I will die with you.

Starting point is 01:14:11 I will fight for you. He's like, I'm going to deny you. You're going to deny me three times? Yeah. And then he does it. And so. Bad luck. And what's interesting is that is particularly clear in the Gospel of Mark, which all the early eyewitness testimony dictates

Starting point is 01:14:25 comes directly from Peter. So the Gospel of Mark portrays Peter kind of in the worst light. And if we're to trust the early source information, which I think we can, that's coming directly from Peter. And so the question is, looking at something like the criterion of embarrassment, this bows well in that you would think that they would try to gloss over some of those things, that these people betrayed Jesus, that they denied Jesus, that they all ran away and they hid. Meanwhile, the women are like taking control. They're going to the tomb too. Yeah. like taking control. They're going to the tomb too. So I totally agree with you that I think we really need to be careful of the fact that you have kind of mythological drift over time,

Starting point is 01:15:17 and you need to be careful. However, there are criteria that we use as historians within the methodologies that we would look at any document to try to figure out, okay, how do we conclude, how do do they reflect eyewitness testimony, not only do individuals like Luke admit their blind spots and saying like, hey, don't confuse me for an eyewitness. I'm not an eyewitness, but I'm interviewing these eyewitnesses. And sometimes he names the people in a purposeful way to say like, hey, go ask. Go ask this person. They're dead, but still ask them. Well, they're alive at that point. You're right. Go ask this person. They're dead, but still ask them. Well, they're alive at that point. I'm kidding.

Starting point is 01:16:06 Yeah. But so we have these kind of levels of credibility that exist within something of the Gospels that when I do historical analysis with someone like Cassio Dio or Tacitus or Plutarch, I'm using the same kind of criteria that I would with the Gospels to try to figure out, okay, what can I deem as credible and what can I deem as not credible? And interestingly enough, the Gospels have a very high inference of this, because I think the authors are going over and above to communicate what we're talking about, you can place within a time and a specific location, and there are people involved. Here are the names of some of the people. Go talk to them. They're still around.

Starting point is 01:16:56 And so I think there is... We do need to be careful of mythological drift or embellishment, which I think we do see in some of the other gospels. How so? The non-biblical gospels. We see aspects of shoehorning of particular beliefs. What do you mean shoehorning? So Jesus, the historical jew but is a pagan mystic a pagan mystic yes like pagan towards what roman paganism believed at the time or just like to a certain degree in the sense of so you and i uh previous to recording

Starting point is 01:17:45 we're talking about um what's sometimes referred to as substance dualism in the ancient world where they believe that the physical world is bad and the spiritual world is good so there were groups um like there was a group called the the docetics or the docetics uh docane in greek means to seem so whereas some people today might have a problem with Jesus being God, in the ancient world, they didn't necessarily have that problem. They had a problem with him being man, like that he was a human was a problem. Because if Jesus is God, they're like, he can't be physical. Physical is bad. So they would strip that of him. And so this is particularly true in the Gospel of Peter, because the Gospel

Starting point is 01:18:25 of Peter has a floating Jesus. He's a doketic Jesus. He's not actually there. And so in the instance of the crucifixion, Jesus is pretty chill because he's not even really being crucified. And so that is a pagan idea that comes from Platonic philosophy that is written onto Jesus. And so from a historical perspective, is it more likely that the biblical gospels portray Jesus as a Jew when really he was a pagan? Or is it more likely that Jesus, living in first century Judea, growing up in Nazareth, living in Galilee, and traveling in these areas, was a pagan? Right. So you're saying all of the non-biblical gospels portray him as pagan. They have some aspect of pagan theology, which is interwoven. Yeah. What do you mean by that? Just like expand. Right. So the Gnostics. So part of Gnosticism, you might've heard that category before. So Gnostics were,

Starting point is 01:19:27 so they're Gnosticism as a kind of Eastern ideological concept comes from the East and predates Jesus. The problem with the overarching concept of Gnosticism is that there isn't one group called the Gnostics. That's a modern category. There were like dozens of groups that we now call the Gnostics. So in one sense category. There were like dozens of groups that we now call the Gnostics. So in one sense, it's a little bit academically problematic to just call them Gnostics. It's putting everything in one basket. Yeah. Nonetheless, if we're going to paint with a very broad brush- That's fine. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:19:54 The Gnostics, if we can boil down the essentials, even though they all disagree with each other and contradict one another on multiple levels, believe in gnosis. Gnosis in Greek means knowledge. And the idea is that you have these divine figures which are imparting secret knowledge to particular people. And so Jesus in the biblical gospels is very public with his ministry. He's preaching in public. He's telling parables, which mind you, can be a little bit cryptic at times, but his actual overt ministry is very public in that way. He's preaching to literally thousands of people. The opposite is true in the Gnostic Gospels. Jesus is kind of covert and he's whispering something into this person's ear and he's

Starting point is 01:20:42 whispering something into that person's ear. And's whispering something into that person's ear and he's kind of trying to keep the secret knowledge close and he doesn't want it to be you know out there and to the public and it's very it's cryptic to the point of being illegible so you read something like the gospel of philip and if you ever sit down and read the gospel of philip you find it doesn't make any sense in fact i, I've translated through the Coptic of the Gospel of Philip from the Nag Hammadi Library. And it's even hard to translate sometimes because the words seem like they don't fit. Like they say things and you're like, I don't know what this means. I don't understand. I'm translating it as it looks, but it's illegible. And that's on purpose. Because the idea is if you're enlightened, if you realize

Starting point is 01:21:26 that it's not that Jesus is divine, but actually you're divine, and you realize your divinity, you unlock that by this gnosis, this secret knowledge. And so this is very different than what we see in either anything that resembles Judaism or anything that resembles what I would say is traced back to the historical Jesus. So it has these kinds of ideas that are more palatable for, say, a Roman pagan audience. They would have had no problem with these ideas. Whereas a lot of the things Jesus is saying are kind of antithetical to common understandings within broader Roman paganism. All right, real quick, I just have to go to the bathroom, but I want to ask you how they're antithetical, right, when we get back. So let's put a pin in that. And

Starting point is 01:22:15 I have you throughout the day today, so we're definitely, like, this is so interesting, man, you're doing a great job. We're definitely gonna do a Patreon episode as well. So we'll do this, and then we'll have some more content there, and the Patreon link will be linked in description. But one sec, we'll be right back. Yep. All right, we're back. So you were going to talk about why it was antithetical to like broader Roman paganism. Expand upon that. Yeah. So what you have in an understanding of Jewish and Christian, what's sometimes referred to as atonement, right? How do you become right with God? In ancient Judaism, you have the sacrificial system that's set up in the temple. And so in the Levitical law, you have in the book of Leviticus,

Starting point is 01:22:54 sandwiched right in the middle between the two holiness codes, you have Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, right? Where they would make the sacrifice on behalf of the nation and the peoples, the surrounding nations. And so there was always this understanding that salvation was something done to you on the basis of God's work. However, in paganism, that was not a concept, right? Salvation is not something done to you. Salvation is something that you can attain on your own. So- Within you. Yeah. And so the Gnostics in particular capitalize on this, where, like I said before, it's not just that Jesus is divine, it's that you're divine and you unlock this divinity

Starting point is 01:23:36 through the secret knowledge. So this is not something that would have been compatible with either ancient Judaism or particularly Christianity, because the whole message of Christianity was, you can't do it. You are unable to do it. The wages of sin is death, but, Paul says, the gift of God is eternal life. And salvation is something that's done external to you based on the finished work of Christ on the cross. But that's not what we get within these other gospels. We get something very different, which strips down Jesus to a very simplistic kind of pagan philosopher, rather than being a Jewish rabbi who's steeped in the Judaism of his day, but then incorporates and fulfills these ideals and messianic expectations. So let's bring this back to the Council of Nicaea. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:24:28 Because what, and this is really good background you've given, but what you've been talking about is how kind of like within the early church itself, they worked out what's there and what's not. But what you had said at the beginning of this, when we were talking about the Council, was that none of this, as far as like the Roman Empire goes, they just kind of took what the church was doing on the text. So the quote-unquote banned gospels, with some of the problems that you had within them as far as like whether they had paganism aspects or whatever, like they just put those

Starting point is 01:25:01 to the side on the recommendation of the early church. Well, sort of. Sometimes it's portrayed as if there is, like, these dozens of groups which we categorize as Gnostics, which are really, you know, a dispersed group. They contradict each other. They have their individual, right? Jesus is either whispering into Mary's ear, or he's whispering into Peter's ear, or he's whispering into Philip's ear. The things that are said about these particular people are contradictory within each of these documents. They don't even agree on what everyone else is saying. But they're also not very popular, and they're really only delegated to specific places at specific times. So by the time the Council of Nicaea rolls around, Gnosticism and all these different groups have really had their heyday.

Starting point is 01:25:50 They're almost dying out. Now, a lot of these Gnostic groups end up surviving past Christianity, and past the Council of Nicaea in particular, but right in the Middle Ages, right? You have the Cathars. We're going to get to that. Okay. But by the time the Council of Nicaea in particular. But right in the Middle Ages, right? You have the Cathars. We're going to get to that. Okay. But by the time of the Council of Nicaea, they're almost exclusively dead. So it's not even really in contention. And these other writings, where the difference of having dozens of copies of the 27 books of the New Testament all over the ancient world, hundreds if not thousands by the time you get to the third, fourth century, you really only have maybe a few copies of the Gospel of Thomas in an isolated area within Upper Egypt. You might have the Gospel of Peter in a particular area of Egypt. You might have some of these other documents, but they're not nearly as prolific, and they're really isolated to particular areas. So the New

Starting point is 01:26:54 Testament scholar Larry Hurtado, who has now passed away, but he did a really good job of sort of tracking this information. Him and there's another guy, F.F. Bruce, who wrote a book on the canon of scripture. And they both talk about the fact that whoever these Gnostics were, they were neither popular nor prolific within the ancient world in comparison to broader Christianity. So the Council of Nicaea is called. It's called because constantine decriminalizes christianity and he sees okay now we have christians coming out of the woodwork now some historians have said that there are as high as 60 to 70 percent of the roman empire being christian at that time i do not think the evidence bears that out i think it's a lot lower than that and with all due respect to the people who say

Starting point is 01:27:44 that based on what evidence though what evidence on respect to the people who say that it is. Yeah, based on what evidence, though? What evidence? Based on the Christian communities that we can both look at in terms of the written documentation and where it's coming from, and based on the previous persecutions, as well as the actual physical evidence, archaeologically, of things like early Christian communities. They did things differently. They communed differently. And so I think it's far more likely that that number is closer to like 15%. And I think that that's pretty high either way, but they're everywhere. Christians are everywhere. And I think that's what's more important. And Constantine is not seeing this as a power grab as much as he's seeing this about the Pax Romana,

Starting point is 01:28:29 the peace of the empire. He doesn't want people disagreeing and he wants to make sure that people are living peaceably. And so he sees this disagreement, which is kind of escalating in the church communities. And he implores the religious officials, the bishops, and the traditional number is that there are 318 people who show up at the Council of Nicaea. I think the number is realistically way higher than that because

Starting point is 01:28:56 they would come not just, the bishop would come like with a community, there'd be church leaders. Interestingly enough, the Bishop of Rome, the quote unquote Pope, doesn't show up. He doesn't seem to have any kind of overarching responsive power at this time. He sends two delegates, but none of the documentation that comes out of the Council of the ACS indicates that the Bishop of Rome in particular had any more or less authority than any other bishop across the Christian empire. And at this point, saying Christian empire is anachronistic because there wasn't a Christian empire yet. But they get together, and remember that this is immediately after a pretty stringent era of persecution. So there are people showing up to Nicaea who have

Starting point is 01:29:37 lost limbs for the confession of their faith. And so this idea that you kind of get from the Da Vinci Code, that this is where the divinity of Christ is decided. I mean, if that were truly the case and Constantine says, okay, I'm going to get you all together and now you're going to believe this. I know you might believe something else, but you're going to believe this now. Well, there are people showing up who are like, I'm sorry, we were willing to die before. Why would we just go along with you but there was and and to be clear like the da vinci code also fictionalizes a lot of things because it's a it's a story yeah sure like there's there's certainly great aspects of history within that dan brown puts within that but there's also things that are you know for the story that said there is some kind of compromise though right because i'm thinking like let's say the people, especially the ones who are showing up without limbs because they've been so strong about their faith. of emotionally and spiritually by this empire and now suddenly this empire is saying hey not only is that gonna stop but we want to include like the emperor himself wants to meet with you guys to discuss a way forward for your religion could isn't there certainly a possibility

Starting point is 01:31:00 that maybe some some simple compromises are therefore then made at that meeting, such as maybe what dates they choose to put certain holidays on that may have matched previous things that the Romans did under their pagan religion and stuff like that? Sure. Yeah, I mean, it's not a question of possibility. Almost everything is possible. It's a question of probability. And so at this point, you already have the fact that Christianity was decriminalized over a decade before. So you already have 10 plus years of kind of Constantine showing his cards. He converts in that time. And I actually think based on how it is described that his conversion was legitimate. I think he actually believed because part of that is that it was a great

Starting point is 01:31:44 detriment to his actual political power. It was. Yeah. Well, because it's a small percentage. Yeah, you're right. Well, and remember before that, the way that Diocletian got away with what he did is by literally making himself the god. Right. And the Roman populists were fine with that. The imperial religion was actually not something they ever had a beef with. And so if Constantine really wanted to grab power, he could just make himself a god again. Or he could continue on in sun worship, which he was basically doing. He could continue on in sol invictus, in worshiping the sun as Saturn, as god. And that would have been completely both acceptable and understandable. In fact, part of the debate about early Christians and some of the accusations that were lobbed against them is that they were atheists in that they denied the gods. So A being the negative participle and then theos meaning God, right?

Starting point is 01:32:38 Not that they didn't believe in any god, but that they didn't believe in the gods. And that they were called antisocial because the religious per the religious festivals and going-ons in the Roman Empire were inherently religious ah yes so they were atheists and they were antisocial if Constantine wanted to sort of continue with the status quo he totally could have and it would have actually made him look way better in the eyes of the populace of most people who were still practicing Roman paganism. And so his conversion is not actually a very strategic move in terms of his political power. Now, I think it ends up being better for him in the end, but he's still an offense about a lot of things. But at this point, by the Council of Nicaea in 325,

Starting point is 01:33:26 he's already at least to some degree to the Christians shown, okay, I'm not gonna kill you guys. I'm gonna decriminalize this. And it's actually said that he commissions copies of the Bibles to be both produced and to be spread around. And this is very expensive, like to the tune of what would be millions of dollars today. I mean, we have what we think are some of those.

Starting point is 01:33:49 So there's a document called Codex Sinaiticus that's at the British Library right now. And what's this? So this is one of our earliest examples of what we would consider a Bible. So before this, you had individual books. So you have manuscripts that float around from the second, third centuries of, say, the Gospels or the Letters of Paul or these documents.

Starting point is 01:34:16 But they're independent largely. So they're specific manuscripts. And there's a categorization system for this. In fact, if you look up csntm.org. Csntm as in Nancy? Yeah, yeah. N-T-M? Yeah. Dot O-R-G. Okay, let's pull that. So that's the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts. So this is done by Dan Wallace. So if you click Digital Manuscript Collection, so this organization goes around the world and they try to preserve manuscripts.

Starting point is 01:34:48 So what you can actually do is you can go over to the classification on the left-hand side, click papyrus, so go down, click papyrus, and then say start in second century and in third century. And then you can even scroll down and be a little bit more choosy. So you can say, I and be a little bit more choosy um so you can say i just want so

Starting point is 01:35:06 you go let's say that the the book of uh go to the gospels because you'll get the highest percentage of that and then you have them listed so you can view so let's scroll down and go to a key a key example go to p66 on the like main body oh on the main body yeah so if you scroll down go to so this is the numbering system so p66 right there uh not that one go back okay go to the second one p66 second third century so this is a copy of the gospel of john oh and so this is what they would have looked like um so this one is actually in gene, Switzerland at the Bodmer Foundation. And this is one of our early- The what?

Starting point is 01:35:47 The Bodmer Foundation. So it's just an institution. So this is one of our earliest examples of a cover to cover. I actually have a full facsimile of this in my office that I do academic work on. Is this written in Aramaic? So this is Greek. Greek. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:36:01 So if you look at it, you can actually click it and it'll get close. Oh, like get a magnifier? Yeah uh whoo that's pretty close so you have there oh yeah that is greek yeah yeah so like the first line scroll the top um the very first line of this yeah you can read ancient greek right yeah so and archa and halagas and kai halagas and prostantheon in the beginning was the word and the word was with god and the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. So I actually have a video on my YouTube, shameless plug, where I work through the first two pages of this document. And I explain – I cite translate it, and I explain the syntax and the grammar and what it says. Because the interesting thing about this is where there's some – a lot of manuscripts have differences within the manuscripts for various reasons. Scribes make mistakes. Scribes make mistakes.

Starting point is 01:36:46 Scribes insert things. There are just, there are hundreds of thousands of these. But the interesting thing about the preface to John's gospel is this reads exactly like a modern translation. So when I translate through verses 1 to 14, verses were added later in the 16th century, but the equivalent of verses 1 to 14, it reads exactly identical to what we would have in our, with no, like, not even issues with spelling or word order or anything. It's very, very interesting. And you were telling me off camera that, like, in ancient Greek, the way that sentences are structured, it like didn't matter the order they put it in. I think an example you gave is like, I went to the club with Bill. And they might say like, club I went

Starting point is 01:37:36 Bill with or something like that. And that's how it translates. But you're supposed to then figure out that it means... Well, when you would translate it out from the Greek, you would put it in the proper word order in English. So you could have it in any word order in Greek as long as the right syntactical and grammatical structures are there, but it would translate out to the exact same thing. Okay. And this is...

Starting point is 01:38:00 So the earliest manuscripts in ancient Latin and Greek and Coptictic are this which is called scriptio continua so it's all capitals no spaces in between words and little to no punctuation so in my um doctoral work in my phd research what i do is i study scribal habits and i study what are called paratextual features you study scrib. Yeah, ancient scribal habits is my area of expertise. What does that mean? So all the people who copy the documents have these like little idiosyncrasies that they develop. So like if you zoom in, so pull it up a little bit. So you'll see a dot right there between the final sigma and the omega, or the omicron right there. Yeah, so that is essentially a verse divider. Now, at this point, verses didn't

Starting point is 01:38:53 exist, but P66 is a good example of a manuscript that was produced probably for public reading. In fact, my doctoral research, what I'm trying to prove is that the vast majority of these documents were produced for public reading. Because it's Christians who start to develop things within ancient Greek like punctuation and spacing and paragraphing. And that's because they were reading these out loud. Christians did that. Yes. And when Christianity is decriminalized and Constantine produces these Bibles, other scribes, non-Christian scribes actually start looking at this stuff and they say, hey, that's a lot easier to read. And they start copying how the Christians have done

Starting point is 01:39:30 it all the way along. Now, you were telling me, I'm gonna get the names wrong here. I think it was earlier in the podcast or right before camera that it was Socrates who said you shouldn't write things down because you won't have a good memory of it. It would make people lazy. Yeah, exactly. You'd make people lazy. So they're taking the opposite end here, Christianity essentially. Oh yeah, Christianity was inherently, and Christianity is interesting because literacy in the ancient world, there was a very established book trade, but it was almost exclusively rich, upper class, educated males. A lot of the Christian... You don't say.

Starting point is 01:40:08 I know, right? A lot of the Christian community were not any of those things. A lot of them were women, a lot of them were not educated, and a lot of them were lower, what we consider lower middle class. A lot of them were women? A lot of them were women? A lot of them were women. Why? In fact, Cicero, who is a philosopher, he critiques Christianity. And he calls it specifically the religion of the foolish, religion of slaves, women, and children. And the reason for that was because that was a group of people within the ancient world who did not have any agency. So. Of course. Yeah. within the ancient world who did not have any agency. So of course, yeah, Christianity comes along and Paul says things like in Christ, there is no June or Greek. There is no male or female.

Starting point is 01:40:52 There is no slave, no free. There is no, no. And he, he says a Scythian or barbarian. So he adds, he has like categories of social class, gender, what we essentially call ethnicity and religion. He says, hey guys, you're all one in Christ. And this paradigm breaks through the narrative of ancient Rome. And it's very countercultural. And that's why Cicero looks at this and he mocks it. Not that Christianity was all slaves, women, and children, but that they were giving any agency and credibility to slaves, women, and children, people who weren't even considered human in some regards. Now, why – that's interesting though.

Starting point is 01:41:34 Let's just focus on the women aspect of it real quick. This is a church that ends up being built upon all males controlling it, and yet a lot of the following was women. Yes. What's the, I mean, that's a very interesting paradox there, if you will. Yeah, so there's a different, there's definitely a church hierarchy and structure that exists. However, it also has the ideal that everybody, irrespective of your gender, is created in the image of God. So male and female are both created in the image of God. Now, when it says that in the beginning of the book of Genesis, that is also countercultural because in the ancient Near East, if you read things like the Sumerian king lists or the Enuma Elish or some of the Sumerian tablets, they specifically refer to royalty being created in the image of God, but not everybody is created in the image of God. And they have a hierarchy, right?

Starting point is 01:42:31 Cherry picking it. Yeah. And there are different... So there's often parallels drawn between the Code of Hammurabi and the Levitical Law. And I think some of those parallels are totally legitimate in the sense that you have these two ancient Near Eastern societies who exist alongside one another. And so you would expect to see parallels and you would expect to see things like, hey, murder is bad, because I think we can largely agree that that's true. Where it goes different is saying, no, it's not just royalty that are created in the image of God. Everybody's created in the image of god and actually the levitical law says that there is no hierarchy in the punishment whereas in the um code of hammurabi there's a

Starting point is 01:43:12 different penalty depending on where you are in the social structure so if if you're upper class and you commit a crime against another upper class person there's a different level of penalty than if you're upper class and you commit a crime against a slave. Its own type of caste system, if you will. Yeah. So coming back to this, because that was a bit of an aside. So this is what largely, if you had a copy of the Gospel of John, it would look like this. This is a codex. Another interesting thing about Christianity is that Christians didn't invent the book, what we would call the codex, but they were the ones who pioneered it as a writing format. Right, they perfected it, if you will.

Starting point is 01:43:54 Well, the ancient world preferred scrolls. So Christians almost unanimously used codices, and we're not sure why. Can you explain to people the codicy aspect there? So a codicy is just a book. Like you would take, instead of taking a long line of papyrus and writing on it and then rolling it up, you would- So it looks like this instead. Yeah, you would bind it on one side and you would write on both sides of the papyrus. And this is long, long, long before the printing press and everything. So this is physical writing. Yeah, yeah. And so this is much more analogous of what people would be considering when they were thinking of scripture, when they were thinking of the Bible. So the word biblos

Starting point is 01:44:33 is simply the Greek word for books. So it's plural. And then eventually it was the book, right? Because for a period of time in the Middle Ages, the only book you might ever have seen in your life was the Bible. But when they refer to the scriptures, they're not thinking of a single bound volume like we would today. We just sort of – we revert to that because that's sort of in our conscious imagination. When we think of the Bible, we think of it – you have the King James with the leather cover on the – and maybe thumb indexing on the pages, right? Right. But it didn't fall out of the Bible, we think of it, you know, you have the King James with the leather cover on the, and, you know, maybe thumb indexing on the pages, right? But it didn't fall out of the sky like that. A lot of them were independent written documents like this. Now, Constantine commissions to great expense of the Roman Empire, a number of what we would then consider as more of a Bible, Genesis to Revelation. So if you look up...

Starting point is 01:45:26 Did he commission that at Nicaea? No, previous to this. Previous. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Almost as like a peace offering to like, hey, Christians, I'm on your side. But if you look up Codex Sinaticus.org... Codex?

Starting point is 01:45:40 C-O-D... How do you spell Sinaticus? So it's Codex with an X. I think you got it. Yeah, CodexSinaiticus.org. The British Library, once again, oh, something went wrong. All right, hold on. Let me Google it. Codex Sinaiticus. Yep, that's it. All right, cool. So you can click See the Manuscript at the top. So you can click, see the manuscript at the top.

Starting point is 01:46:06 So this is put on by the British Library. And then, so Genesis is not a very good example. So the thing with codexes is that the front and the ends are very vulnerable. Yeah, what are we looking at right now? Yeah, we're looking at Genesis chapter 21. So this is all that survives at that section. That's all that's left? Yeah. So do people like fill in the blanks

Starting point is 01:46:26 with what they thought it said? I mean, we have tons of these manuscripts. So the answer is both yes and no. So we have both Codex Sinaiticus and then we have also a number of other ones. But this is probably, I mean, you can also, so click at the top, Genesis. Where does it say that?

Starting point is 01:46:41 So right up, choose a passage, it says, just above there. Oh, got it. So go up, choose a passage, it says, just above there. Oh, got it. Yeah. So go up, click Genesis, go down all the way, and go to Matthew. OK. It's going to look a lot nicer than.

Starting point is 01:46:56 Oh, yeah, that's clean. Yeah, so and then you can even look. So what they've done is you can actually go to chapter and verse. And then they have it on the side right so they have the transcription in the what is a modern greek script and then the translation on the bottom they've done a pretty good job and you can zoom into this and you can look at the different aspects this is another document that i i work pretty often with

Starting point is 01:47:16 interestingly enough when billy carson refers to the sinai bible he's talking about this the sign when he said is that the whole thing where he talks about Jesus going to the pyramids and shit? No, he says that the crucifixion is not in the Sinai Bible. And he credits this as one of, if not the earliest Bibles. And you're saying this is the same thing? I'm saying this is not just the same thing, but this reads exactly like your copy of the Gospel of Matthew today. And it says the opposite of what he's saying. It says what any other Bible translation you're going to work with.

Starting point is 01:47:46 And you can find that through this Codex Sinaiticus. Yeah, you could just go to chapter and verse and read through it. Nonetheless, we're pretty sure this is one of the Bibles that Constantine commissioned based on the dating of it. Oh, so we're just doing it based on the date. That's why we don't know for sure that he said we're doing this. Well, no. We have his decree that he did this. But not for this one necessarily. No.

Starting point is 01:48:13 So this one, we kind of conclude based on its dating and based on just how expansive it is. So this book would have taken 360 sheep to make. It would have been exorbitantly expensive. So based on the fact that we know that A, Constantine commissioned these Bibles to be produced, and B, that he did so at great expense, this is what it would have looked like. So this is one of the clearest examples, because we can actually walk through the text. But there are other ones. In fact, there's one that's here in the States, Codex Washingtonianus, which is in – it's in the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.

Starting point is 01:48:56 We have Codex Alexandrinus, which is another one that comes from this time, and Codex Vaticanus, which is in the Vatican Library. And so all of these documents – Have you ever been there? The Vatican? No. I haven't. Okay. But interestingly enough, it was like you couldn't see Codex Vaticanus.

Starting point is 01:49:13 It was like they're very like choosy with who could and couldn't go see it. And then five years ago, they digitized the whole thing. And they allowed people in. So I actually know people personally who have had access to the Vatican library to look And then five years ago, they digitized the whole thing and they allowed people in. So I actually know people personally who have had access to the Vatican library to look at Codex Vaticanus in person. But you have these examples. I may say what's online matches up. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:49:37 That's good. Shout out to the Vatican on that one. I know, right? All right. So we have these examples of what are probably, like we can't say with 100% certainty, but based on the fact that these are pretty, A, they're professionally done, and B, this would have been like way beyond the scope of any, even a rich person at this time. To annihilate an entire flock of sheep simply to make a Bible. Like, it makes sense that based on the dating of these, that it was probably part of this commissioning by Constantine. So this is all in the intermediary period leading up to. So in terms of your question of why would they trust Constantine, I think Constantine had actually done a pretty good job of proving, both with his actions and with his words, although not perfectly, that he was a genuine believer and that when he calls the bishops to get along at the Council of Nicaea, and it's also important to keep in mind that

Starting point is 01:50:38 he's not actually part of the proceedings. He says, hey, I want you to get along. And then he backs off. And one of the reasons we're pretty confident that that is the case is because emperors like to take credit for all sorts of things. You don't say. I know, right? No politician does that today. Wait, are you telling me that politicians like to take credit for things? Listen, I didn't say anything. I don't know if I can believe that in this day and age. And he doesn't. We have no record of him taking credit for anything. In fact, we have record of him specifically backing off and letting the proceedings of the council take place. And then the council of Nicaea was specifically to address this issue of Arianism, where Arian and his followers were saying, the specific line is is there was a time when the sun was not.

Starting point is 01:51:25 Now, there's a story that's very fun, but it doesn't actually come from this time. It comes from later. Okay. That St. Nicholas – Like Santa Claus? St. Nicholas, yeah, because he's from Myra in Turkey. Santa's Turkish. He's a fourth century bishop.

Starting point is 01:51:42 Oh, shit. So the story is, although keep in mind, this is a little bit apocryphal, coming afterwards. When Arius says there was a time when the sun was not, St. Nicholas stands up and punches him in the face. That's bad Santa. Isn't that a fun story? Yeah. It's probably not true. I want that to be true.

Starting point is 01:51:59 But you can find Eastern Orthodox icons of St. Nicholas hitting areas. Love that. Yeah. All right. A little humanity there. You know, you got to get the energy out sometimes. Yeah. So that was the major issue.

Starting point is 01:52:13 The major issue was, hey, we got to sort out this thing because we have a pretty articulate theology on how the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit operate within the one being of God. And what you're saying does not adhere to what actually Scripture articulates on that. The secondary issue, and you're exactly right in terms of saying that there were some dating issues in regards to holidays, the secondary issue was the date of Easter. When do we celebrate Easter based on what we see from some of the descriptions of when it could have been within the Gospels? Yeah, they need a set date on that.

Starting point is 01:52:55 Every year that pisses me off. It's like, is it going to be April? Is it going to be March? Is it that week? You know what I mean? Well, it's based on the Jewish calendar is why. Yeah, set date. Yeah, yeah, fair enough.

Starting point is 01:53:05 But that was the main issue. So the Council of Nicaea had nothing to do with any books of scripture, and it had nothing to do with establishing any actual doctrine that wasn't already believed. But it addressed a theologically problematic belief that was becoming popular that was not in line with what scripture actually articulated. But they quote scripture within the documents that come out of Nicaea, which includes the Nicene Creed, which sort of the bare minimum of what every Christian denomination... What's that? Like the, I believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty... No, that's the Apostles' Creed. Although I'm impressed that you know that. Yeah, I was right. There's somewhere floating around in there.

Starting point is 01:53:43 Yeah, yeah. No, the Nicene Creed is a little bit more wordy than that. But they come up with that, and then they come up with 40 kind of statements that come out of that in a letter. So we actually have the actual documentation. It's not hard to figure out what NYSE was actually about. We have the receipts from what actually took place. So that's why when you have something like Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, and he's saying that all sorts of things took place, every scholar on planet Earth who had ever even done a cursory glance at Nicaea was like, hold on.

Starting point is 01:54:20 Like, this is pretty easily demonstrated to be not just not the case but like way off on a different universe. Yeah, again though. But that's like – I said this earlier. But I didn't realize like people were taking all that seriously. Maybe I'm like really naive on that. They do. It's also – he wrote a fictional story based on some truth. But like of course you're – it's not all exact.

Starting point is 01:54:42 Like if you're getting the Council of Nicaea history from Dan Brown, that's not Dan Brown's fault. That's your fault. You would be surprised. We shouldn't be. Yeah, I want to get Dan Brown in here badly like at some point. So I'd love to ask him about that. I mean Dan Brown in the preface to the book says that the narrative is not true but that the details are true. So – All of them.

Starting point is 01:55:07 Well, he claims that a lot of the things are actually representative of what took place in terms of this idea of Jesus being married, drawing from the gospel of Philip and other things. I think that now I'll say on that, not a scholar. Yeah. Look say on that, not a scholar. Yeah. Look around on that. But I think there's an interesting story there for sure. a tacit agreement or straight up, if you want to say like conspiracy, to devalue Mary Magdalene and therefore devalue any feminine influence within the church.

Starting point is 01:55:50 Not to say the church should be like feminine or something. I don't think it should be masculine or feminine. I think it should be a fucking church. But to paint – because we kind of got off this, so maybe it's a good time to come back to that. To paint her as a prostitute, which is like the lowest – So that is incorrect. So she wasn't a prostitute in the gospels. So that's actually a mistake from a Pope.

Starting point is 01:56:07 Because there are two stories. There's one story of a prostitute who comes to Jesus, and there's another story of Mary Magdalene, and they get conflated, but they're not the same story. So there's actually a Pope. His name alludes me at the moment, but there's a Pope at a certain point in time who specifically in uh i can't

Starting point is 01:56:28 remember if it was a sermon or a letter he wrote or a commentary he conflates the two but in the gospels themselves mary magdalene is never described as a prostitute okay but and i'll take your word for that you know a lot more about this than I do. Either way, they also paint her as not – her gospel is not accepted. Her gospel is an interesting story. She's therefore not involved with the church, and they paint her as just someone who was kind of around Jesus' life or whatever. And they made this – this is what's always kind of fucked with my head the church puts this thing on sex right you have to wait till you're married it's like this holy sacred union whatever it's run by a bunch of dudes who don't have sex though unless it's the

Starting point is 01:57:21 catholic church in which they have some illicit sex with little boys but I'm saying like it's run by people who then say oh we're not going to do that we're going to be chaste and whatever and Jesus I think there's some talk where he talked about like I am I'm paraphrasing here but like I come from the father so I'm I'm married to heaven or whatever rather than flesh on earth or something like that. But like, what would be so, like, it seems like the church established at some point, like early on after Jesus' death, the early Christians established that he was this celibate, godlike figure who did not commit the sin of having sex on earth and no, wasn't married. Why is that so important? I think it's kind of weird that, like, again,

Starting point is 01:58:07 if he's divine, maybe it's not weird. But like on the surface, it's like a 33-year-old dude back then, which is like you're fucking 50, isn't married and doesn't have kids. That would be an oddity, if anything. Like, why is that such an important part of the Christian church? Frankly, I've always thought that's like very stupid. It's just my opinion. But like, why is that like a critical part of the teaching and then makes like sex this thing when in reality, by making sex this thing that's like a no-no, everything's about sex. We call her the Virgin Mary. We talk about the celibate Jesus, the celibate, like they're making it about sex. You see like the paradox, almost the catch-22 in their wording there? Yeah, I think there's definitely an imbalance

Starting point is 01:58:50 that has taken place in terms of maybe the communication of what sex is. I mean, ultimately, sex within Christian and Jewish heritage is a sacred thing. It is a beautiful thing. It is something that God designed. I mean, arguably the first mandate that God gave humanity was be fruitful and multiply. Like this is something, but the, the cultural or not cultural, the covenantal understanding of what sex is, is that it exists within the parameters of something that is holy in terms of the union. The first covenant was marriage in Genesis, and sex operates within the bounds of what marriage is. Now, the whole issue of celibate priests aside, I'm not a

Starting point is 01:59:33 Catholic. I don't think the celibacy in the priesthood was ever a good thing or even a biblical thing. As a Protestant, I believe in the priesthood of all believers. So we don't have that. And we don't have that because I think that that is both incorrect and problematic. And I agree with you, but also, as you said earlier, to the credit of Protestantism in this case, you guys branched off and took away some things like that, which is great, but you still descend from the people who created that religion, who that was like a part of it. Sure. I mean, in terms of the status of women, I would actually say the inverse is true, is that, you know, you have this cultural expectation in

Starting point is 02:00:08 Greco-Roman antiquity where there is no natural way in classical Latin to say male virgin. Because the idea of a male virgin was not a thing. From an early age, you would have been expected as a particularly a Roman male, like a citizen, but not, not exclusive to that, to have sex with whoever you want, whenever you want at any time. Okay. That would be the expectation. On the inverse side, there are 25 ways to say female prostitute in Latin. Because there is this understanding that it males, chastity is not a thing. However, you want to be married to a chaste woman.

Starting point is 02:00:50 And the women were actually held to a higher standard and prostitutes were looked down upon. Although there is this category of priest prostitutes within the religious system where you could go and sleep with a priestess and that would be part of a worship ceremony. A priestess. Yeah, yeah. Like in, say, the Temple of Athena. Oh, okay. The temple prostitutes were a common thing.

Starting point is 02:01:15 But nonetheless, Christianity comes along following Judaism, which has this idea of the sacredness of sex, that sex is something that's beautiful, that's ordained by God for a specific purpose in a specific time for the normative function of both marriage and procreation, but not limited to that because we have the book Song of Songs or Songs of Solomon in the Bible, which is basically a giant love poem from Solomon to his lover. That exists within the Bible. It's a thing. Sex has and always will be a beautiful thing within Judeo-Christianity. Now that goes awry when we try to make it into something where we almost over-sexualize everything. And then if everything is sexual,

Starting point is 02:01:59 then it's almost like nothing is sexual. And I do agree with you in the sense that I think that is problematic. However, Paul then comes along and he actually says, husbands, you need to look after your wife and sacrifice yourself for your wife like Christ did for the church. And Christ died for the church. And Paul actually holds men to the same standard that women are held to within the Roman ethic and says, no, you can't just go around and sleep with anybody you want. You need to hold to the sacredness of this institution that is going to sit at the bedrock of humanity in that the first creation mandate was be fruitful and multiply. And so once again, that was seen as counter-cultural and actually held men to the same agency that women were held to in that day, which was seen as very feminizing to the Romans. They looked at Christianity and

Starting point is 02:02:59 they said, at minimum, it's stupid. But what all of this does, going back to what I was saying about Cicero in chastising Christianity as the religion of women, is because women started to both be given agency and be given an ability of equality within Christianity. And there are some interesting studies that have been done where you can track the agency and rights of women across the ancient world. And it's exactly correlative to Christian missionaries going in previously. So Christian missionaries go into an area and five to ten years later, the agency of women and them actually being seen in some instances as actually human starts to pop up. And it's because Christianity, although it has not been perfect, has always given a level of credibility to women because it holds to this foundation that we are all created in the image of God. Right. And let's give them credit for that. So within the community, they do that and there's evidence for that. Why within the community, they do that, and there's evidence for that. Why in the power structure did they not have that? Why was it all, I mean, it still is. I mean, there's nuns,

Starting point is 02:04:11 but they don't have any power. Yeah, I mean, I think that there's, so I hold to a position of what's called complementarianism, that men and women have different roles, both in their genders and in the operation of the church, that they are equal, but they complement each other in different ways. And so when you look at how Paul writes to the churches and says, hey, here's how the church structure should be operating. You have Christ as the head, and then you have elders and deacons. And he specifically says, those are men. Now, what that's not saying is that these are the most important people. And this is something that the Protestant Reformation, when they reformed the church, I think brought back to a level of, okay, we need to reevaluate this. We need to

Starting point is 02:05:04 recalibrate this because the priesthood has been elevated to something that it never should have been. And this is why you have in Protestantism, and even Protestants don't do this very well. There are lots of churches where you have celebrity pastorism. I would say that is actually anti-Protestant in the sense of historical Protestantism. I mean, I think they're the worst people on the planet. Like anyone who – I mean, you see this latest one. They're like selling plots of land in heaven to people.

Starting point is 02:05:33 Oh, yeah. But that's just stupid. Yeah, it's stupid. But I'm saying like people who bastardize what's such a well-intentioned thing that plays on people's ultimate question in life, which is the meaning of it and where it goes and what they do, special place in hell for you. Yeah. I mean, Jesus warns against that in saying that there will be wolves among the sheep. Yeah, that's absolutely right. Wolves in sheep's clothing. He specifically says that and says there will be false prophets. In

Starting point is 02:05:59 1 John, it calls them the antichrists. Literally, we think of the antichrist, but really, scripturally, there are multiple antichrists in Literally, we think of the antichrist, but really, scripturally, there are multiple antichrists in the sense that they are the opposite of what Jesus is actually teaching. And I would say that a lot of these people, not everybody is a wolf in sheep's clothing, but there are some very overt wolves in sheep's clothing. But going back to what I was saying about women is part of the problem of something like celebrity pastorism is that it makes it look like the end all and be all of the Christian community is the pastor. And that is not necessarily true. as people who both have the ability to procreate, to create other human beings, and then raise them to be things like good citizens and godly men and women, I would say that that is actually

Starting point is 02:06:54 potentially a more important role within the life of both Christian church and within society than anything like a pastor could ever be. Because the pastor is a shepherd, right? That's where the word in Latin, pastor, means shepherd, and that's where that comes from. But women have always been the current that sits at the heart of the structures of everyday life. And we see this even in the New Testament when Peter writes, he writes, and there's a specific section where he says, hey, Christian women, if you have a husband who is not a Christian, you need to make sure that you are being an example to them and

Starting point is 02:07:38 you are being a wife that up into the point of like being asked to do something which is like problematic and sinful, you need to show by example how you can lead the family. And we have lots of examples of this, of converts who the wife comes to faith within the antiquity and then the family follows suit afterwards because women are such an integral point and the normative position of a wife is to then be you know the the mother in that community obviously there are caveats to that and things happen but the normative position of marriage is procreation and the furtherment of things like society. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:08:28 There's so much of, you know, when you look at how society functions and what the role religion plays in that from a cultural aspect, it's impossible to deny how much that has rubbed off. Like you can look at people now who, you know, may not know anything about religion and aren't religious at all. And yet customs that they practice every day of their life are almost like direct descendants of what was perhaps within Christianity or within other religions as well, depending on where you live. There's a great book by a guy named Glenn Scrivener who we're actually bringing over. He lives in the UK. He runs an organization called Speak Life. And we're bringing him over in November to speak at a conference we're running in Ontario. And he wrote a book called

Starting point is 02:09:13 The Air We Breathe. And he goes through a number of these things historically, where he talks about how Christianity is actually the, it's the progenitor of a lot of these things that we just assume within modern society. And one of the things he highlights is consent. Consent is a Christian ethic in the sense of, if you look at ancient cultures, but that's- Sexual consent? Yeah. The idea that this should be consensual. Like I mentioned before, the whole idea of there not being a natural way to say a male version, but 25 ways to say a female prostitute. That was the Roman ideal. And that was just normative. And it was seen as just the

Starting point is 02:09:52 neutral position. Whereas Christianity always looked at that and saying those women have value and purpose and meaning. They bear the image of God. And so they need to be both protected and valued and seen as equals. What about Judaism, which wasn't the Holy of God. And so they need to be both protected and valued and seen as equals. What about Judaism, which wasn't, you know, the Holy Roman Empire. They had their own sect as well. Yeah, I mean, I think this ethic sits at the heart of what Judaism should be, but things definitely go awry. We don't always do this well. And that's what Jesus a lot of the time criticizes, is the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter 5.

Starting point is 02:10:27 A lot of it is about this, where he says, you have heard it said, but I say. And so he looks at the law, and it sounds like he's correcting the law, but that's not what he's doing. He's actually going back to the intention of what the law meant. So when he says, you have heard it said, do not kill your brother, but I tell you, anybody who has hatred in his heart for his brother has committed murder. He's not saying that, you know, if you hate your friend, that you're actually committing murder, but he's getting to the heart of the issue of what the law actually meant. Like the purpose of the intention of these things communicate ethics and values before they actually communicate prescriptions of how things should actually be. And part of the problem was

Starting point is 02:11:11 that you had these sects, S-E-C-T-S, not S-E-X, that I mentioned before, like the Pharisees and the Sadducees, who were hyper-religious. And Jesus looks at them and he says hey you're tithing your like mint leaves that's stupid that's missing the point of what tithing is about like stop the stop going so into the specifics of the law where you're actually missing the force for the trees and part of that i think is this development which we see within Judaism, which is a negative patriarchal aspect. I mean, I don't think that patriarchy is necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, but there's a negative aspect of patriarchy in the same way that if you look at the content of Christianity and you pour it out, you get things like love your neighbor as yourself. Pray for those who persecute you. But Christianity has a long history of not doing that well.

Starting point is 02:12:11 There's another great book by a guy named John Dixon who is an Australian New Testament scholar. He wrote a book called Bullies and Saints. And he goes through a lot of these examples of where he points out, okay, things like public education. How's a Christian institution? Things like universities, Christian institution. Public healthcare, Christian institutions. But then he says, you know, Jesus says, make sure you take the log out of your eye before you start pointing at the speck in your brother's eye. Let's look at the logs in our eye. Let's look at some of these examples of where Christianity has really done a terrible job at articulating and living

Starting point is 02:12:46 by its essence when you say those are christian institutions is it literally they're started by christians on the basis of their christian faith or they're started by people who happen to be christians and therefore the christian institutions you understand what i'm saying yeah well if you look at their motivations yeah for why they're doing they're doing, a lot of it has to do with, like, the education factor was we want people to be able to read the Bible. Like, a lot of the origins of public education come out of individuals like John Knox in Scotland, who was like, hey, I'm a Protestant. We're translating the Bible in English. I want people to know what it is. And the interesting thing I mentioned to you earlier before the show, Tom Holland, the historian, not the actor, Spider-Man, always have to preface with that. In his book, Dominion highlights, has a big section

Starting point is 02:13:36 on slavery and says, there is no abolition movement anywhere in history that was not both a Christian one and was motivated specifically by Christians. Why? Because they said, we see the fact that we're all created in the image of God. And in fact, one of the first abolitionist movements was in the fourth century by the Cappadocian fathers. And what they did is, I think it was Gregory Nancy Antus preaches this sermon where he says, how dare you think you can pay a price for God's image? You can't do that because there is no image on – there is no price that could actually pay for how valuable the image of God is in every individual. And so they're the first ancient abolitionist movements. And then you also have Augustine, who's raiding these slave ships. Him and his church members are going in and raiding the slave ships and releasing them.

Starting point is 02:14:35 He writes and he says, I don't know if this is right to do, like ethically go in and like literally clear out these slave ships,, you know, this is to detriment of these people who this is their job. But at the same time, I can't help but do this. And so you have these institutions which are not just motivated, but even the abolitionist movement in both England and then later in the United States, they were all Christians. None of them were not Christians. And even when the abolitionists, there's a great section in Tom Holland's Dominion where he talks about how a number of the British abolitionists went down into North Africa to try to convince some of the sultans within North Africa to get on board,

Starting point is 02:15:22 and they laughed at them. They laughed at them. And actually one of the lines, I think it was in Libya, the Sultan of Libya said, the only institution that goes back to Adam is slavery. In that it's like as inherent as it is for humanity to be humanity, slavery has also come alongside it. And I mean, slavery, there's still slavery going on in a lot of the muslim world but the word slave comes from the fact that north african muslims were selling the slavs from europe into slavery white slaves was literally where we get the word slave from yeah it's the slavics so

Starting point is 02:16:04 all a number of these institutions that both Tom Holland, who's not a Christian, and Glenn Scrivener, who is a Christian, write about in Dominion in the Air We Breathe, point out very, very, both articulately, but pretty exhaustively, certainly Tom Holland's book is exhaustive, where a lot of these things that we just assume within modern Western world, because the modern Western world largely has a Christian origin, these come specifically from Judeo-Christian values. You're not getting it from Islam. You're not getting it from ancient Roman paganism or European paganism. You're not getting it from hinduism you're not getting it from buddhism this is specifically predicated on the idea that humanity has self-worth intrinsic worth not extrinsic worth well at the at the center of this is the uniqueness of christianity

Starting point is 02:16:59 from a cultural perspective and what i mean by that is let's look at the three most recognized religions right Christianity Judaism and Islam Judaism is also a race right Islam does exist now across some different races but it's highly highly centered on say the Arabic world and near that. Christianity, in part, I think, because of its birth and the timing of its birth, considering the ancient Roman Empire comprised of a lot of different places with different cultures and races, and then the idea spread throughout that empire and then beyond. Christianity doesn't have a race. Christianity represents everything. So when we look at the humanities and, and let's say more modern history, like, especially like, and by modern, I mean, like the last five,

Starting point is 02:17:52 600 years, especially where the world has spread and globalized the new world, America and the West forms and things like that. You have, you're going to have such a downstream effect culturally of, say, the Christian church inevitably because it's spread so far and wide across many different literally racial cultures. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. And it's transcultural in that sense. and you have Nigerian Christians and you have French Christians and you have Indonesian Christians and Canadian Christians is because it transcends any one religion or one ethnicity or geographical location. And that was partly confusing to a lot of the ancient world.

Starting point is 02:18:40 But like I mentioned to you before, there was this moment early on in, in Christian history, in the book of Acts, they get together and they have to decide, okay, if you believe in Jesus as the Messiah, if you've accepted him as your Lord and savior, do you need to convert to Judaism? Do you need to both obey certain laws and get circumcised? And they unanimously say no, because that's not what this is about. This is not about just this specific ethnicity. God has chosen people of every tribe, tongue, and nation. And the covenant is... So in ancient Israel, Israel operated as a city on a hill is how it's often described in the Old Testament, in that they were this example to the nations.

Starting point is 02:19:28 We are God's chosen people, and we are going to live a certain way, or we're called to live a certain way. Obviously, they don't do it very well a lot of the time. That's what most of the books of the prophets are about, to be a reflection of God's goodness to the people. In Christianity, it's, okay, now everybody is indwelt by the Holy Spirit. So we are not relegated to a particular area or a temple or a country or an ethnicity. It's beyond that. It's bigger than that. God's mission, which was always the intended mission, transcends those things. Those things that we look at in ancient Judaism are pointing to what is the greater fulfillment. This in the New Testament, there's a book called the book of Hebrews. And the book of Hebrews is all about this.

Starting point is 02:20:20 How all of these motifs in the Old Testament are fulfilled and actually were pointing to Jesus all the way along. This is the kind of thing that like we could go down every tangent, like every five seconds with what you say because there's so many pieces of history and evidence that we got to run through to buttress it. And like I'm really amazed by the scope of your knowledge on this stuff. And I think we mentioned it earlier, but just to be clear for people out there, you're proficient in multiple languages, including ancient Greek. What else? Well, they're all dead languages. So I don't know if that counts for anything. That does count for something. Nobody speaks them.

Starting point is 02:20:59 But people spoke them in the past. You can study it. Yeah, they did. And we can debate as to how they actually pronounced it because we have no idea. Yeah. So primarily Greek and Hebrew. Sorry, Greek, Hebrew, and Coptic are the languages that I operate. Coptic is like Egyptian. Coptic is a form of ancient Egyptian. So I know a little bit of Demotic, which is ancient Egyptian prior to Coptic.

Starting point is 02:21:19 And I've dabbled in some languages that are related to Hebrew. So the Afro-Semitic languages like Akkadian and like Aramaic. And then very, very, very recently, like as in I've got some lexicons in the last week, I've been trying to make sense of some more Sumerian. But Sumerian is a weird one because it's a language isolate and it is not related to any of the other languages in any specific way. So it's kind of off on its own. We have some of these examples of language isolates, whereas like at minimum, Semitic languages have some correlative crossovers. So if you know Hebrew, you can figure out Aramaic based on the Hebrew you know, you can figure out some Akkadian based on that, but that is not true

Starting point is 02:22:05 for Sumerian. Now, you've studied the, we talked about some of it today, but you've studied the history of the other religions too. Obviously, Judaism, it's tied very correlated to Christianity, but Islam, you mentioned you read the whole Quran and you have colleagues like in the space and talk with them. When it comes to the history of say, like the pagan religions that predate this stuff, like we've been talking about ancient Rome today, right? Ancient Rome, ancient Greece. Have you studied the origins of their religions as well? Yeah, definitely. Would you mind, let's start with Rome. Can you explain the basis of what they believed in, you know in starting in the BC times for people out there?

Starting point is 02:22:48 Yeah. So it's a little bit tricky in the sense of there are multiple religions working alongside one another within Greco-Roman antiquity in that the ancient world was not just polytheistic in that they believed in multiple gods, but they were henotheistic. And what henotheism is is that there there's all the gods exist on a hierarchy. And so when my patron god, I go to war and I defeat you, that's a symbol that my patron god is actually stronger than your patron god. And some of our gods could actually be the same gods by different names. So Zeus and Jupiter, there's a lot of crossover between Greece and Rome because the idea was within a henotheistic worldview that they were actually the same gods. We just call them different things. And maybe we have some different articulations of different

Starting point is 02:23:33 stories. And we have good evidence for this, obviously. Yeah. And they had no problem with going in and doing things. So I was in Egypt last summer. And if you go to Luxor, in one of the quintessential temple of Luxor, you go in and the temple is very, very old, thousands of years old. But there's a section in what is actually the end of the Holy of Holies in that temple, where Alexander the Great has built a separate little box that has a roof. And if you didn't know, if you couldn't read the inscriptions on the wall, you wouldn't necessarily identify it as having been Alexander the Great, other than maybe there's a few Hellenistic Greek motifs on some of the columns or whatever.

Starting point is 02:24:17 But in the actual pictography of the hieroglyphics, Alexander the Great is portrayed as a pharaoh, and he's being portrayed as a pharaoh that is being seen as being approved by the gods. And this was not problematic to Alexander the Great being a worshiper of Zeus, because it's not a competition to his religion. In Egypt, Ra rules the day. In Greece, Zeus rules the day. So when you're in Egypt, you just give homage to the fact that the god of Egypt is, you know, the way you convince everybody that you're the king is then you, you know, portray yourself as being approved by said gods. So this was just how the ancient world operated. There are multiple gods. There were even house gods. So, but they don't have anything like the, sorry to cut you

Starting point is 02:25:11 off, but it's not like there are stories that are paralleled with like a physical being like Jesus that then resurrects. No, not in the same way. So any of the sort of... So this is an idea that's often referred to as Jesus mythicism, that the idea of a God being virgin born and having 12 disciples and then being crucified and rising from the dead on the third day, that this is just all, it's a parallel to other ancient gods like Attis or Mithras or Osiris. And so Jesus' mythicists draw these parallels that actually, if you read the documentation, don't actually exist. There is no example of all those things within these other gods. And even the closest thing, if you want to say that Osiris was resurrected, well, okay, maybe, but the story is that he's cut into

Starting point is 02:26:11 a whole bunch of pieces. He's thrown into the Nile River and his wife Isis goes and collects all of his body parts, except for his penis. She can't find the penis because it's eaten by the Oxyrhynchus fish in the Nile. And so she creates a wooden penis. And then she wraps it all together. And this is the first mummy because she wraps all the body pieces together so that there's one unit. And he comes back to life as the revivified mummy god of the dead.

Starting point is 02:26:39 With a wood dick? He has it, yeah. He's a wood phallus, which he actually sleeps with and then creates Horus. That's the origin of Horus. and that's with a that's possible listen no but we're talking to mythology here but nonetheless so some people say well that's actually that's an example of how do we get the term woody from i don't know i'm not gonna i'm not gonna go there it's going there um

Starting point is 02:27:10 when some people point to that and they say oh well that's actually a virgin birth right that's the virgin birth of horus oh but but they're all intents and purposes that is nothing even analogous to what the the gospel described as a virgin birth so you're really you're you're pulling at any type of parallelism that you can possibly find. So there's a scholar named N.T. Wright. He currently is- Like N.T., like the letters N.T.? Yeah. So what's his name? It's, yeah, the letters N.T. and then W-R-I-G-H-T. English theologian. Yes. Very prolific Pauline scholar. He wrote a book called, that right there, The Resurrection of the Son of God. Second one is theologian. Yes, very prolific Pauline scholar. He wrote a book called, right there, The Resurrection of the Son of God.

Starting point is 02:27:46 Second one is the green one. He goes 150 years before Jesus, and he goes 150 years after Jesus, and he tries to find any parallels in any other ancient pagan stories. What did he find? Nothing. There's nothing analogous. But this guy is a Christian, right? He is a Christian, yeah, but he's a pretty prolific historian. Right, but there could be like a bias there, hypothetically.

Starting point is 02:28:10 There could be, but I think it's related to the fact that the ancient world thought that resurrection was nonsensical. So anything that you could think of as a resurrection, like Osiris being the mummified god of the dead, I mean, he doesn't even actually leave the realm of the dead. He's relegated to the land of the dead at that point. So using that as an example of the resurrected Jesus who comes back in a new glorified body that is real, where he talks with his disciples, he eats fish, they touch him, they speak with him. This is sometimes referred to as multivalent experiences, where it's not just them seeing him, but they actually touch him, they eat with him, they speak with him, they walk with him, that kind of thing. To say that that is the exact same thing as what happens to Osiris is pretty ridiculous. It's a stretch. Yeah. And I think this goes part and parcel for every other example that you can find.

Starting point is 02:29:09 Now, there are some parallels, obviously, but the parallels that match up are just broad examples of Horus gets in a boat and Jesus gets in a boat. And you're like, okay, well, I can agree with that one. You know, some of these people are called the Great Shepherd. Okay, well, I can agree with that one. Some of these people are called the great shepherd. Okay, well, the shepherd was a common motif in ancient Near Eastern society, so I'm fine with that one. But it's when you go to the particulars of virgin birth and what that means

Starting point is 02:29:38 within Christianity, very specifically, having 12 disciples, being baptized by John the Baptist, who is his cousin, which is another thing that actually Josephus mentions, is John the Baptist. Yeah, there's some interesting stuff in Islam with John the Baptist too. Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. So all of these very specifics about Jesus's life, I can agree on a lot of parallelisms that are at best cursory, but it's the differences that make the difference. And when we're really getting down to the specifics, do you know what the Texas sharpshooter fallacy is? No. Okay. So the Texas sharpshooter fallacy in the like formal rules of logic comes from the idea that you have a Texas, a Texan with a pistol and he's firing in the side of a barn

Starting point is 02:30:25 and he's just firing at random. And then he goes and he finds the closest cluster of bullet holes and he draws the target around them. That's making himself look like a great shot. Yeah. And so when we- Yeah, right? When we come to things like historical parallelism,

Starting point is 02:30:41 we need to make sure, A, we're not committing the Texas sharpshooter fallacy and just looking for all the closest cluster of things, even though there's a mound of differences over here. But, you know, these five things actually correlate. And we're not committing the correlation versus causation fallacy. Because some things are always going to correlate that don't necessarily cause that thing. You have to draw a direct line within historiography to proving, okay, A follows B. And that's really hard to do in the whole Jesus-Mathesis theory.

Starting point is 02:31:15 Nevermind the fact that there's a whole field of study called the discipline of the historical Jesus or historical Jesus studies. And what's this? It's a form of historiography that's not necessarily like a believing Christian one. There's a journal of the historical Jesus, which has both like believing and non-believing scholars that publish in it. But all of them believe in the historical Jesus and have actually published pretty widely on dismantling all of this Jesus mythesis stuff because it just doesn't add up. Wait, maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, but like Jesus of Nazareth is a historical character.

Starting point is 02:31:54 That's proven fact. Whether or not you believe every single thing that's like written down in text, that's up for debate and stuff. For sure. Are you just saying that they're confirming that he was a historical figure or that the actual narrative around him is um both and so a part of jesus mythicism is an argument that jesus never existed and that the reason why we can show that he never existed was because of all these parallels that he was actually just a copycat so it's a version of historical he existed but he was just copying shit i know that they invented him afterwards to justify the religion. But we know he exists.

Starting point is 02:32:28 Yes. Like that's historical. Yes. So what's the point? But these communities exist online. And there are some more type of – I mean, do you see other communities exist online too? You're not wrong there.

Starting point is 02:32:39 But there are some more kind of academic formulations of this. There's a guy named Bob Price who has a formal PhD in history who uses some of these arguments in order to deny that Jesus actually existed. There are a few others of them. the thousands of scholars that exist within historiography, the ones that deny the historical Jesus based on these arguments, I could probably count on one hand. Yeah. Who have like actual accreditation? Well, another thing here too, that we haven't, like, I think it's come up intermittently today. I can't remember what we were talking about before versus what we were talking about on camera. So apologies if this came up more than I thought. But when you're looking at all these texts, and I'm not just talking about the Bible or ancient texts related to Christianity. I'm talking about everything, every topic, every religion, all of it.

Starting point is 02:33:36 There are all kinds of potential translations. I mean you will have one line in the Bible that people translate fucking 40 different ways, and this word being there versus that word being here can completely shift the meaning with this. So as someone who can actually translate some of these languages, how do you even navigate that if sometimes something is like, wait, all these versions of the Bible translated this different, and it could throw it could throw off the whole meaning of like an entire book or something like that, or a story within the book. Like, how do you navigate that? Yeah. So translation exists on a continuum of philosophy. So typically what you're looking at is what's often referred to as formal versus dynamic equivalence. And that's sometimes parsed out by using the terms phrase for phrase and thought for thought. So we have this like incredible amount of English translations of the Bible to the point where we do not need any more English translations of the Bible. Like it's a problem.

Starting point is 02:34:37 And this is not something that other languages have. I have friends who are, say, Cantonese or Korean or even French. They only really have a handful of translations in their language. In English, we have just so many. And this is, it's an epidemic of the fact that a lot of scholarship has existed in the English-speaking world for a long, long time. But they exist on this continuum of getting the thought for thought or the word for word in that if you have said number of words in the Greek or Hebrew, you're trying to render them in that number of words in English. Now, that's not always possible. And even the most like literalistic

Starting point is 02:35:18 translation is going to have to deviate from that at some point. So let me give you an example of this in the sense of one of the most quoted verses of the Bible in the Bible is a version of Exodus 34, 6, where God appears to Moses and he says that he's a compassionate God, that he is abounding in love and mercy. And then in the Hebrew, it literally says, and I am long of nose. Now, no translation renders that in any language that I'm aware of, specifically English, as long of nose. So what does that mean? Well, it's an idiom. It means that he's slow to anger. So even the most literalistic translations, there are a few out there. The New American Standard Bible is pretty literalistic. The English Standard Version is pretty literalistic.

Starting point is 02:36:07 They're not going to render that as long of no's because it just doesn't make any sense. And so some are going for more of, and this is kind of my beef with some more classical translations. So if you come to my church at West Toronto Baptist, we have pew Bibles in that you sit in the seats and there's a Bible in front of you. That's an ESV, an English Standard Version. It's a pretty darn good translation of the Bible. On what basis? I don't love it. On the basis of that it's pretty, it has a very knowledgeable committee of scholars who are committed to rendering the text to the best of their ability. However, it's a very literalistic translation. And so particularly in the Old Testament,

Starting point is 02:36:54 I don't love some of its translation choices because it just feels awkward. So actually, when I was on a plane flying over here, I was looking at an ESV, an English Standard Version, and I was looking at Mark chapter 1, where Mark chapter 1 quotes Isaiah saying the prophecy about Jesus via John the Baptist, calling John the Baptist one who's crying out in the wilderness. But it starts by saying, I am sending a prophet before your face. Now, that is literally what the Greek says. I'm sending him before your face but if you jump to a more dynamic equivalent translation like the niv the new international version or the net the new english translation it's going to say something like i'm sending a prophet ahead of you because we just don't say a before your face right like um hey jul, Julian, I'm going to send this thing before your face.

Starting point is 02:37:46 Right. Yeah. It doesn't make sense. It's awkward. But that is literally what the text says. That's what I would say. It's awkward. I feel like it almost makes sense. It's just awkward. Like, why would you say that? Yeah. Yeah. Some of these translations are like driving an old stick shift. Yes. Where like, you can figure it out, but you got to really get it into gear and you got to fight with it sometimes. Whereas some translations are going to go and really try to render the meaning of the text.

Starting point is 02:38:08 Now, academically, there's a debate. What do you want? Do you want something that is very emblematic and authentic to the actual words? Because Jesus didn't, well, Mark did not say sending him ahead of you. He said, sending him before your face. Or there's another example in the Gospel of Luke where Jesus says to his disciples, oh, what's the phrase? It's, let these words sink into your ears. Now, that's literally what the Greek says. Now, a more dynamic equivalent translation is going to say, listen carefully to what I'm about to say. Now, Jesus did not say that, but that's what he meant. And so this is the-

Starting point is 02:38:51 And we can ascertain that. Yeah. It's fair to make that leap, you're saying. Totally. So you have these issues like idioms. You have these issues like kind of awkward wording that if you just translated them directly, it doesn't, you got to figure it out. And so actually, if you go to, this is a shameless plug, if you go to wesleyhuff.com, I know, right? You got to get it. We'll have that link in the script. Okay. I appreciate that. I actually have a section.

Starting point is 02:39:16 So one of my, you should have made it wesleyhuff.com, two syllables. I already bought the domain. So unfortunately there's a tab at the top that says Infographics. This podcast was called Trendify at one point. It was the dumbest name of all time, and now it's not. I'm just saying. There you go. I could switch it up. It still is my name, though.

Starting point is 02:39:35 Okay. Here we go. I'm pulling it over to this. Okay. So if you scroll down, I actually have – Oh, shit. No, go down. Keep going.

Starting point is 02:39:43 Keep going. Keep going. Keep going. Right? No. Keep going. Sorry. I thought that was it. That's not it. I actually oh shit no go down keep going keep going keep going keep going right no keep going sorry I thought that was it that's not it under manuscripts no I think it's under the Bible archaeology is it not there I hope it's there translation so up that one so that is my trying to map the continuum of Bible translations via thought for thought and word for word. And so these are like the main English translations that if you go to Amazon and you're looking for English Bible translation, and you can see there's a lot there. Like there's too many, right? And so it exists on this continuum of dynamic and formal equivalence. And so this,

Starting point is 02:40:26 I often tell people, see this less as a spectrum and more of, a lot of these translations are actually on top of each other more than they're like, one is slightly further to the left or to the right. But then you have paraphrases on the end. And paraphrases are something that I would not recommend because it's not actually trying to translate the words as much as it's trying to create a paraphrase of what's being said. But to your question – Wait, who's making this determination again? I might have missed that in there. Me.

Starting point is 02:40:58 So this is just you. It's an educated perspective on Bible translations more generally. So I am getting advice from other people, some of whom sit on the translation committees for these very Bibles, who I have kind of... What are the backgrounds of those people? Are they always like all Christian or... No, it's all over the place. All right, that's good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like that. Most Bibles will have a translation committee. So there are some like evangelical Bible translations, which are pretty good. So the NIV, the New International Version, is an example of a more sort of evangelical Bible translation. But the people are still Bible scholars. Like they're the top of their field. V or the AMP or, you know, these, even the NET is done by, is headed by the individual who

Starting point is 02:41:49 runs the organization that I showed you before, the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts. So he has, out of Dallas Seminary, put together his own committee of Bible experts, and they came up with the New English Translation, which has exhaustive footnotes. So one of the things about the NET is that I don't always love the way that they translate the text, but they go to length. Like sometimes I have a paper copy and the footnotes are longer than the actual text of the Bible. Because they're like, hey, any possible issue you have with like interpretation or manuscripts or variants or whatever translation, we're going to try to give it to you as best we possibly can that's legible. So usually when people ask me a question about the Bible or like a specific verse, and I'm like,

Starting point is 02:42:35 I don't know, what I do is I pop over to the NET and I look at what the translation notes say, because it's exhaustive. So your question about translation and the complexity of translation is a good one because whether we're talking about the Bible, now, fortunately, we have all of this stuff with the Bible, which is why when people ask me, what's the most accurate Bible? I usually say that's, I don't know the answer to that question because I don't know what you mean by accurate. Because some Bibles are really great at rendering what the meaning of the text is. Others are really great at rendering like the actual literal words. Some are a mix, but I... What's more important? That's the debate. And ultimately, I don't know because sometimes you miss things in one or the other. See, I,

Starting point is 02:43:21 and this just, you know, armchair, non-expert take, but I would think the best translation would be the literal words that then as a second layer, once you have the literal words of whatever was written in the language on paper, you could then have some sort of expert translation of, say, some of the idioms or culturally unique things that would have been said within those languages that don't translate perfectly to English or whatever language you're translating it in. Yeah. And there are some Bibles that try to do that, but I think they don't do a really great job of that. So the AMP, the Amplified Bible, gives you all the possible translations of given words. And that's like interesting, but largely unhelpful because words almost exist exclusively in their meaning in their context so sure these are all the possible uh hypotheticals of what a word could be translated but what does it mean in that context because it it doesn't mean all these things and it could just mean one of those things. And so that's where I don't actually

Starting point is 02:44:25 recommend something like the Amplified Bible, where they're trying to do that, but they're almost going over and above in an unhelpful way. I mean, all this caveat aside is the fact that we have phenomenal English translations. Like the amount of scholarship that's been poured into the English Bible is ridiculous. And largely the reasons why we debate about these things is because there's so much. The problem remains when we don't have this 2,000-year history of translating the Bible and looking at all the different options and versions with other documents. So when you're talking about something like the Epic of Gilgamesh, you're reliant on really only a handful of translations, unless you're able to

Starting point is 02:45:13 go back and read, you know, a Katie and Cunea form. Right. Which is far more unique. Yes. And look, there's still arguments on how things are translated within the languages that we have far more understanding on. I mean, you're familiar with my buddy Danny Jones's podcast, right? Danny Jones's podcast. So Danny's one of my best friends, and he's a fucking gangster because he's such a humble guy, but a lot of people don't realize before he was ever a podcaster, he was a world-class documentarian and cinematographer all these things and the reason i think he's one of the best on planet earth he might be second best in my book behind joe rogan is that he doesn't give a fuck who he's talking to he wants

Starting point is 02:45:57 to capture what they say put it out there document it and let other people decide. So you're talking about a guy who talks to people from every end of the spectrum, literally known to man, and the range of his podcast at this point with the opinions of guests has gotten, I don't think there's anything else like it online. Now, he had a guest somewhat recently, like in the last six months, named Ammon Hillman. And this is is where I see you smile about that. This is where I also want to make sure I'm clear, like as the guy hosting the show, just kind of where I stand on some stuff. I'm going to come back to Ammon. I was not the biggest fan of him, but just so people understand where I'm at, I don't, I grew up Catholic, you know, St. Anthony's

Starting point is 02:46:43 the name of the family. I, I, I wear, I wear the pendant in that way, but like I'm not a practicing Catholic. I do believe there's a God. There's a creator. I think I'm going to have to answer that someday, so I want to live well on here. I think that a lot of people in the world use different organized religions like Christianity for good. There's a small percentage that uses it for bad. I have some issues with some of the history there and things that have gone on, but that's just like my personal end of it. So when I tell you I look at these hardcore ancient histories and what we were told versus hardcore religious people and scholars, like I really come at it somewhere in the middle here and am open to what people say.

Starting point is 02:47:21 That said, I think everyone from either angle is motivated by the things that happen to them so to bring this back to ahman this is a guy who to empathize with him has been attacked mercilessly for years by structures up to and including the literal catholic church where you know they got him kicked out of jobs and shit like that. And at the base case, as someone on an expert of languages, there's no doubt that he has a massive understanding. It doesn't mean he's right about everything, but he has a massive understanding of ancient languages and certain parts of that that very few, if any, people study. There are guys like Brian Marescu who talk about

Starting point is 02:48:06 and have cited him before and talk about what a brilliant guy he is. That said, the reason I wasn't the biggest fan is because I think in the equal but opposite reaction to life that I talked about earlier, he has been strongly behaviorally motivated by anger at what has been, I agree, unfairly done to him in many ways that has kind of pushed him to a point where he wants to get to the opposite conclusion no matter what. So it's not good enough that like, for example, the Catholic Church and the teachings of Christianity are wrong. It's like, no, Jesus used kids as drugs, and it has to go too, too far. That said, you know, I haven't, I listened to that podcast back when it came out.

Starting point is 02:48:45 I haven't listened to it since. So I'm a little, there were a lot of things in there. I'm a little hazy on some of the stuff. I know you've gone through that and whatever, but what were, what were some of the biggest points of contention that you felt you had evidence against that, that he made from, let's say, like a translation basis in there. Yeah, that's a good kind of segue within this conversation, because Amon does have a very specific level of expertise, and he's very proficient in classical Greek as it relates to medical texts. Now, classicalism in terms of ancient Greek literature is huge. I mean, there's a wide spectrum of all sorts of things that fall into classics. Everything from like Plato and Xenophon to these medical texts that individuals like Amun are dealing with. I think part of the problem, and aside from the character assassination

Starting point is 02:49:39 that I can't speak to because I've only seen bits and parts of it and would probably agree with you that it's not, that's not fair. His arguments in particular are not just fringe, they're him against the entirety of the scholarship. And that's where he's taking very specific parameters for words, and he's then applying them in ways in context where they just do not apply. And individuals who I greatly disagree on a whole range of things, individuals like Dan McClellan and Kip Davis, who Kip is actually a fellow Canadian, he lives out in British Columbia, but have pointed out the fact that what he's doing is he's applying a very specific level of terminology within the ancient Greek language in cases where it doesn't apply. And so it's the equivalent of saying, so in my own sort of sphere and field, there are specific terminologies that exist within theology, like we talk about Christ condescending. And what we mean by that is literally the Latin con, meaning with and descend, to come down.

Starting point is 02:50:54 And so when we're talking about the condescension of Christ, what we're talking about is the humility of Christ to step out of his eternal throne as the second person of the Trinity stepping into humanity. But if you were to say to someone after this, if someone said like, hey, you met Westhoff, how was he? And you went, ah, he's a little bit condescending. You wouldn't be talking about my humility. No. Right? Because that word has a different meaning in its different context. And part of the problem with something like what Amon says is that he's taking terminology that exists within the parameters of a specific

Starting point is 02:51:32 field, and then he's applying them in areas where there's an entirely different contextual meaning and spectrum of understanding. So part of what he said that some people jumped on was that he says that the word Christ comes from the Greek word krio, which it does, right? To anoint. And in ancient Greek medical texts, there is a usage of that, which he has capitalized on with applying drugs to your eyes. Now, more broadly, rio does mean to rub, particularly a liquid ointment or substance, on your body. So this relates to everything from bathing to ritual practices in religious circumstances. But you could likewise say, if you put on, if you were an ancient Roman and you had a bath

Starting point is 02:52:31 and you came out and you put on cream, skin cream, so your skin didn't dry out, that that was an example of hrio, you were applying it to your body. Well, within the religious connotation of Christianity is the translation of the Greek word Mashiach, Messiah, which likewise means anointed one, right? There were multiple anointed ones in the Old Testament. It was just a word that was referred to priests or kings or, and had a very specific connotation in the Mashiach, who would come and be different. And the Greek

Starting point is 02:53:07 translation of that, which both the Greek translation of the Old Testament and in the New Testament both use, is Christ. Why? Because it means anointed one. So Ammon takes that and he says, well, in this very specific instance, in this stream of classical medical literature, it means to apply a drug to your eyes, specifically related to not the bot fly. What does he say? He relates it to a fly. I don't remember the detail, but... Well, and it does mean that in the particular instance that it's being used but this is where semantic range is very important and this is the problem that um some others have uh yeah should we should we pull up this clip by the way sure so there's there's context i i think i have it i just want to see so that because i want people to follow along with what you're getting at here.

Starting point is 02:54:09 So this is, let me turn this bad boy up. Hold on. Right. What is the Antichrist? What is the Christ, if you have to know the Antichrist, you have to know the Christ. Right. It's a great word. For? For applying a drug to your eyes so that they may be open.

Starting point is 02:54:30 That's what the Christ means in Greek. Yes, it's from the verb hyo, to be stung by the gadfly. Hmm. Who's the gadfly? It's a state of mania they call it in greek oyster mania to be an altered state right it's a thing they had going on remember they have orgies and stuff like that so you better buckle up okay so that and and that's kind of what you were just getting at with what he says there. But you're saying that like he's stretching some of his knowledge are used specifically within biblical studies, but this applies to anything within the ancient world where we're trying to come up with

Starting point is 02:55:28 translations in deriving meaning. The first is there's a discipline called hermeneutics. And hermeneutics is this interpretation. It's the methodology of interpretation that we use in a particular text. Before hermeneutics is exegesis. And exegesis is a Greek word that literally means to bring out, right? The opposite would be eisegesis, to read into. So when you're exegeting something and you're looking at an ancient language, you're trying to get at the author's intention by different levels of contextual application. So there's immediate contextualization, there's document contextualization, there's historical contextualization, there's document contextualization, there's historical contextualization. Unfortunately, what Amon is doing is he's confusing and conflating whole realms of how we do interpretation of ancient languages and how those operate within a specific context. So in the biblical documents, Christ has a very

Starting point is 02:56:27 specific meaning and application. That doesn't mean that hrio does not mean applying a drug to your eyes that you may see. That's not what anybody is saying. I don't think anybody who reads classical Greek would say that that's not true. It's just that that's what it means in a very specific instance, right? I could talk about the right to bear arms and i could be talking about firearms or i could be talking about a grizzly bear right and and talking right so you're saying it's cherry picking it's not even that it's cherry picking it's broad brushing it's broad brushing to, in a way that, I think it's very clear that Amun has a lot of proficiency

Starting point is 02:57:11 in classical Greek. Yes. But he doesn't appear to have as much of a proficiency in Koine Greek, which is what the Bible is written in. So Koine means common. So if you read something like, so when I was doing my language exams as part of my entry to my PhD program, I had to do a series of Plato, and he wrote a number of other philosophical exercises that are very important. Xenophon's Greek is very, very different and far more complex than something

Starting point is 02:57:53 like the Gospel of Mark. And even in the New Testament, the Greek spans between very simple and very complicated. So the Gospel of Mark, actually, I mentioned earlier, when Luke says that he's writing up an orderly account, and that others have written accounts, he's implying that there are accounts that are not orderly. And I and a number of other scholars think he's actually referring to Mark, because if you read Mark in Greek, it's very, very simple. It's almost written like a child. It has what's called parataxis formulations. Parataxis? Yeah. So children, when they say things, like my son will say, Daddy, and then I went to the park, and then I got on the slide, and then I, you know, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then.

Starting point is 02:58:34 Mark continually says the phrase, and immediately. Everything is immediately. And immediately, Jesus got up out of the water, and immediately, he went out into the wilderness, and immediately, he was in the temple, and immediately. And immediately, Jesus got up out of the water. And immediately, he went out into the wilderness. And immediately, he was in the temple. And immediately. And it's just a symptom of very simple writing. Yes. It's called parataxis.

Starting point is 02:58:59 And so a lot of the times you'll see this in the translations, but sometimes they just leave out the end immediately because it's just superfluous. It's not needed because it's just like ad nauseum repeated all the time. And if it's deemed to not actually be communicative to what Mark is saying in that particular instance, it's just kind of the repetitiveness of the phrase, then some translations actually leave it out in some instances entirely. So you have this spectrum. For a long time, scholars looked at the Greek of the Bible and they were confused by it because they were like, why is it so different than the classical Greek? Why does it operate on a, at times, a more simplistic level, but it just looks different? And there was a period of time in the Middle Ages where they referred to it literally as Holy Ghost Greek,

Starting point is 02:59:43 where they said, actually, this is what inspired Greek looks like. This is divine Greek. Queens College, they head over to Egypt to look for not a statuary or a monumental architecture, which was the standard for the time in Egyptology. They were looking specifically for manuscripts. And they end up going all up and down the Nile. They're running out of finances. They don't know what to do. And they stop in this city called Oxyrhynchus, and they turn to the garbage dumps. And they dig up the garbage dumps, and they find thousands, half a million papyri. In the garbage dumps? In the garbage dumps, because Oxyrhynchus was this key center of learning. However, a lot of it is just what's sometimes called documentary papyri, where it's things like

Starting point is 03:00:45 receipts or it's things like communication from political officials. And lo and behold, this Greek looks like New Testament Greek. And so that's when we get this classification of koine, of marketplace Greek, of common Greek. And actually it was the opposite of what scholars in the past thought. This isn't like special divine Greek. This is actually regular people Greek. This is what you would have been talking in the marketplace. And so the gospel authors are writing in this way, A, because it's simple, and B, because that's what the average person is going to be able to understand if they are or have some level of literacy. They're not going to be reading Plato. They're not going to be reading Cicero, but they may be able to read,

Starting point is 03:01:30 you know, their receipts, their laundry lists. Yeah. The Cicero, I'd love to get your thoughts. Like, I'd almost love to see you watch the whole Amun podcast and keep pausing it and like react and see maybe there's even some stuff you're like oh but some of the stuff he has on Cicero because that's separate from like the biblical things I mean I don't know if it's right or wrong or whatever but that was eye-opening for sure and I know that was eye-opening for Danny too that said your point about Amon having a knowledge that very few people have on certain aspects of linguistic patterns in ancient languages – I forget some of the terms of them. I'll fuck that up if I try to say it. But your point there is right, and I also think that's the slippery slope with a guy like him too because I will tell you i don't care what the topic is whenever i hear someone come out and say i'm the only guy that knows about what's happening with this language

Starting point is 03:02:34 yeah i've been studying this my whole life right and there's really no one else who's gone to israel and studied the g Greek among the architecture there. When I hear that, that says to me like he's therefore saying because I'm the only knowledge on this, you have to listen to me. And he's precluding that there could be any defenses against what he's saying because other people don't know, which, you know, it's a strong word to use. But when I hear stuff like that, I go, oh, is that like charlatanism? You know, because you're trying to say like you got to come through me. There's no other bridge here to this knowledge. Yeah, there is a logical fallacy.

Starting point is 03:03:19 That's the logical fallacy of the populace in saying that the majority is always right. And I think it's not true that the majority is always right. I mean, I hold positions that is not the position of the majority, even within my field. But it's a matter of then do you have good evidence to push back against the consensus? Because I'm fine with people holding fringe views. I hold a bunch of fringe views. The fact that I did the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke as early as I do is not the consensus within my field. However, I think there are good reasons to do that. And unfortunately, there are positions within Ammon to give him the credit where it's due in saying he knows classical Greek and in a particular vein incredibly well. However, he then extrapolates that and says,

Starting point is 03:04:06 this expertise allows me to make conclusions like the Greek translation of the Old Testament is not a translation, it's the original. And the Hebrew is the translation. When of the tens of thousands of Septuagint scholars, so that's the Greek translation of the Old Testament, that Septuagint, no one holds that position. Not like there's a few little, there's a contingent here, nobody. And I think, unfortunately, it's emblematic of the fact that specificity and expertise in one area does not necessarily then extrapolate it into all of the areas that could possibly be adjacent to that. Good point. That's really well said. Listen, I want to get to one more main topic in here, and then we're going to do a Patreon episode. There's going to be stuff in there. We'll talk

Starting point is 03:04:53 about the Templars. We'll talk about evolution. We'll talk about the biblical timeline and all that. But on the actual episode here, just because we talked about it earlier and got off it and said we come back, some of the other ban books quote-unquote of the bible you got things like the book of enoch yeah uh nephilim i my buddy mark gagnon actually just did an episode with a guy that i haven't seen yet that's like popping off where they went into all this so i gotta check that out everyone check out camp gagnon great show but like what what's what with let's start with enoch like Like, what's the history there? And what's like the arguments against that being a part of the Bible? Yeah, so we've talked about a number of documents

Starting point is 03:05:31 that would fall into the category of apocryphal literature. And so apocrypha, the Greek word apocryphos just means secret or strange. And it becomes sort of the categorical term within early Christianity to describe anything outside of that which is canonical. So the canon is what's considered scripture. Everything else is apocryphal. That doesn't necessarily mean it's heretical, but it just means it's in a separate category. Within the category of apocryphal, you also have documents that are sometimes referred to as pseudepigraphical, right? So think of pseudo, like a pseudonym, right? It's not your real name. Pseudo and graphe. It's a strange writing. It's not your, like pseudo means false and then graphe means writing. So pseudopigraphical documents are

Starting point is 03:06:18 documents like the Book of Enoch, which have a label of being written by a particular individual who it's largely agreed upon is not the individual. And so that's in a category of its own. The thing with Enoch is that it was never considered banned. It was always part of a group of Jewish literature, which was very important within sort of the Jewish understanding. So we've largely been talking, almost exclusively, I think, about documents that post-date the New Testament documents, right? So the Gospels that were written by the various Gnostic groups, those are after Jesus. Enoch comes before Jesus, and it's in a category of literature that was written between the last book of the Old Testament and the first book of the New Testament. So there's about 400 years there between, I mentioned in the Protestant Old Testament, you have the last book is Malachi. Between Malachi and Matthew, there's a 400-year

Starting point is 03:07:15 gap, which is sometimes referred to as the 400 years of silence, which is a bit of a misnomer because it wasn't silent. There was a whole bunch of Jewish literature being written, but there was this cultural understanding within ancient Judaism that the voice of God was not being communicated through prophets in the same way. So that's why it's sometimes referred to as that. However, the Jews are writing all sorts of things. And one of those things that they were writing on was the Book of Enoch. Now, we also need to be careful with the Book of Enoch, because what we call specifically First Enoch, there's a first and second Enoch, when the Book of Enoch is usually referred to, it's usually referred to, we're usually pointing to the Book of 1 Enoch. In fact, there's a pretty recent, very good translation of it by the publisher Hermania, which is the most updated one, takes into consideration things like the

Starting point is 03:08:11 Dead Sea Scrolls. And what you have there is a collection of various Jewish texts that span about a period of 200 years before Jesus and about 50 to 100 years after Jesus in multiple languages. So you have sections of the Book of Enoch in Aramaic, you have sections in Coptic, and you have sections in Greek. And those are all brought together in what we call First Enoch. Now, the old sections are really, really old. The old sections are about 200 BC. They're in the third century BC, and they're largely written in Aramaic and Greek. And those predate Jesus by a ways, and actually, the New Testament shows recognition of it. In the book of Jude, it refers to a section of the book of Enoch. So it's present in the Bible. Now, that doesn't mean they thought it was scripture,

Starting point is 03:09:04 because we know unanimously they did not think it was scripture. Jude is simply referring to a piece of literature that they would have been familiar with to make a particular argument. Paul also quotes, he quotes Menander, the Greek philosopher. He didn't think Menander was divinely inspired. He's just using the literature of the day to make particular arguments. But when we're talking about the book of Enoch, Jewish scripture occasionally refers to supernatural beings, like angels, like seraphim, like cherubim, like demons. But it doesn't really, or the watchers is another one. Is that the jinn? No.

Starting point is 03:09:44 That's different. That's Islam? Yeah, that comes along. That's about 600 years after. That clever somewhere is like, God damn it, Julian. Yeah, no, the jinn are a separate thing. Got it. Entirely.

Starting point is 03:09:56 They're good and bad jinn. They're not even in this sort of category. So you have these things mentioned in the Old Testament, but they're never really explained. And so within this 400-year period between the Old and the New Testament, the Jews are like, okay, what do we think of this? How are we to understand these supernatural beings that are created by God, that exist in some sort of parallel world in the unseen realm, and they're interacting with one another, and they have different forms and functions. So one of the issues is that we often refer to

Starting point is 03:10:31 a bunch of these things as angels. Angel is not what the thing is, it's what the thing does. So malach in the Hebrew or angelos in the Greek means messenger. So it is not a description of its ontology, what it is, it's a description of what it does. These are supernatural beings who go and they communicate messages to people. They're in some sort of relation in terms of their supernaturalness to other creatures like the seraphim and like the cherubim, who are supernatural divine throne guardians, which was a concept that was not foreign to the ancient world. You have Lamassu, which are the winged bulls with the human heads in Babylon, and you have sphinxes in Egyptian and Hellenistic culture. These were just concepts that existed within the ancient world. The gods have

Starting point is 03:11:27 throne guardians. And within biblical Judaism, these are the seraphim and they are the cherubim. So sometimes you'll see those memes, the biblically accurate angels. Those are cherubim. That's what they are. It's not actually an angel. It's kind of a misnomer in terms, but I get it because we kind of broad brush with all these categories. The Book of Enoch is part of the literature that's trying to explain that. What on earth is this? Actually, if you go back to my WesleyHuff.com, I do. So every Monday, I do these posts that I call Manuscript Monday.

Starting point is 03:12:00 So if you go back to the homepage, yeah, click that, scroll down, and you'll see the blog post. Keep going, keep going, right there. So, Biblically Accurate Angels. So I actually explain some of these. If you go down, go up, right there. So like angels, seraphim, cherubim, and then how these are portrayed. And I particularly go through the manuscripts and how both Christian and Jewish interpretation of them reflects them differently. But these are portrayed, and I particularly go through the manuscripts and how both Christian and Jewish interpretation of them reflects them differently. But these are these characters which the book of Enoch is trying to make sense of, along with demons. And so the way that they go about that is by capitalizing on the events that happen immediately before Genesis chapter six in the biblical flood, where you have the great-grandfather of Noah, Enoch,

Starting point is 03:12:53 as this character who is explaining some of these fallen angels or beings. Genesis chapter six says that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were pleasing to the eyes and slept with them, and that these created men of renown. And that's the word nephilim. Ah, there it is. So the trickiness of this is that in ancient Judaism, when it's translated into other languages, Nephilim is almost exclusively translated as giants, but the word etymologically in Hebrew, nephal literally means to fall.

Starting point is 03:13:23 So there's this whole narrative within ancient judaism of the the these things are fallen angels um and so but that's not the same thing necessarily in ancient judaism as demons and that's where it gets complicated okay so i'm just reading the background here so people have it the nephilim let me pull this over here so it's on the screen the nephilim are mysterious beings or people in the Bible traditionally imagined as being of great size and strength. The origins of the Nephilim are disputed. Some, including the author of the book of Enoch, view them as the offspring of fallen angels and humans. Others view them as descendants of Seth and Cain. The reference to them is Genesis 6, 1-4, but the passage is ambiguous and the identity of the Nephilim is disputed according to the Numbers 13.33.

Starting point is 03:14:07 10 of the 12 spies report the existence of Nephilim in Canaan prior to the conquest by the Israelites. A similar or identical biblical Hebrew term read as Nephilim by some scholars, or as the word fallen by others, appears in the Ezekiel, 27, and is also mentioned in the Deuterocanonical books, Judas 16, 6, Sirach 16, 7, Baruch 3, 26 to 28, and Wisdom 14, 6. Yeah. So let me read that for us. When men began to multiply in the face of the land, the daughters of them were born. The sons of God saw that the daughters of men were attractive, and they took as their wives any they chose. Then Yahweh said, My spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh. His days shall be 120 years. The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came into the daughters of men, and they bore

Starting point is 03:15:02 children to them. These were mighty men who were of old, men of renown. So that's literally what the Hebrew says. And so it's not like the Wikipedia article accurately says, it's not entirely clear what's going on there. But Enoch is part of the Jewish conversation in trying to flesh this out. But, and particularly in the Book of the Watchers, which is the oldest book. And so that's what Enoch is. Now, part of the confusion about the Book of Enoch is because the Book of Enoch is never considered scripture by the Jews, but ends up in the Ethiopian Bible. And part of- Ethiopian Bible. Yeah. So the Ethiopian Orthodox Church is a wing of, you have these different sort of overarching

Starting point is 03:15:51 denominations of Christendom. You have today Protestants, Eastern Orthodox, Coptic, Roman Catholic, and then the Ethiopian Church. and then the Ethiopian church. And the Ethiopian church, we know that around the fourth century, missionaries from Syria went down to what then was referred to as the kingdom of Aksum, which is in modern day Ethiopia. And they brought with them a whole host of literature. And part of this literature was New Testament books in Greek and the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, which at that point was finalized. And the Ethiopian church took all of this literature, which included literature that nobody considered scripture at the time, and they appear to have just been non-discretionary and included everything. So all of the debates that were happening in the Latin West and the Greek East about what was and wasn't scripture, they looked at that and they said, we're not really interested in that.

Starting point is 03:17:05 We'll just take everything. canonizing everything, which leaves them with a canon of scripture that is completely unique and includes books like Enoch, which the ancient Jews and every ancient Christian didn't believe. Well, actually, I should preface that. There were a couple of early Christians who said, we think this could be scripture, but then they accept when all the debates happen that, okay, those are pretty good reasons where we're not going to accept it in the end. And so I don't know where the idea came from, but there is definitely a prevailing myth on the internet that the Ethiopian Bible is the oldest Bible. And that's not true. In fact, the oldest copy of the Ethiopian Bible, which is full in terms of a Genesis to Revelation copy, is 14th century. So it's a long, long time after. But there's a lot of talk online about Enoch and particularly the copy of Enoch that is in the Ethiopian Bible and that, oh, well,

Starting point is 03:17:59 that's actually reflective of the original Bible because the Ethiopian Bible is the oldest. I don't know how that myth started. It's patently untrue. But what ends up being what we call the Book of Enoch ends up in its final form in the Ethiopic canon. It's a lot on the bone today, man. Yeah. You know a lot of stuff. Sorry about that. No. I'm opening up the fire hose and asking you to drink.

Starting point is 03:18:22 Sorry. That's exactly what we want. We want the fire hose coming out. I really appreciate you sharing so much knowledge. I'm sure people will have all kinds of opinions online in the comment sections and stuff. But all of ancient history where it ties into religion and ideas and how we formulated today, because it all comes back to today. It's so fascinating to me. So I appreciate guys like you coming in here and doing this. We're going to go do a Patreon episode now. I went through some of those topics. We'll definitely get into the Templars and some of the things in the Middle Ages that I think are interesting when you look at the history of the Christian church and some other stuff, including evolution. So

Starting point is 03:18:58 people, if you want to join on Patreon or YouTube membership, you can hit that link in the description below. That's down there, but we will have your links as well down below, Wes. So people can follow you on Instagram. We'll have your website as well. And I appreciate you coming here from Toronto to do it, brother. I appreciate you giving me a platform. My wife is certainly bored of hearing all this stuff. She better listen to this one though. That's right here. Anyway, we'll do it again sometime. All right. That's good. All right. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Thank you guys for watching the episode. Before you leave, please be sure to hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video. It's a huge help. And also if you're over on

Starting point is 03:19:35 Instagram, be sure to follow the show at Julian Dory podcast, or also on my personal page at Julian D Dory. Both links are in the description below. Finally, if you'd like to catch up on our latest episodes, use the Julian Dory podcast playlist link in the description below. Thank you.

Julian Dorey Podcast - #257 - Ancient Language Expert on BANNED Bible, Book of Enoch & Jesus Origins | Wes Huff

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